pened his heart to me.

"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-handed
sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do that, one
must go where the power is, and give it just as constructive a twist as
we can. That's MY Toryism."

"Is it Kindling's--or Gerbault's?"

"No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs out. You
and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why aren't we working
together?"

"Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.

"That's a secret nobody tells," he said.

"What are the Confederates after?"

"Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to
do."...

The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at once
attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose membership
nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ample
constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate,
they had an air of deliberately organised power. I have no doubt the
rumour of them greatly influenced my ideas....

In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two years I
was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a matter. I was
not dealing with any simple question of principle, but with elusive and
fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the nature
of my own powers. All through that period I was asking over and over
again: how far are these Confederates mere dreamers? How far--and this
was more vital--are they rendering lip-service to social organisations?
Is it true they desire war because it confirms the ascendency of their
class? How far can Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before
it resists the thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more
than a mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard
suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the community?

That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like asking
what is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer varied
with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the people I was
watching. How fine can people be? How generous?--not incidentally, but
all round? How far can you educate sons beyond the outlook of their
fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-indulgent class above the
protests of its business agents and solicitors and its own habits and
vanity? Is chivalry in a class possible?--was