was hovering about Miltoun's
lips?

"I've got a foolish theory," came from those lips, "that one must know
the conditions first. I want to give at least five years to that."

Lord Valleys raised his eyebrows. "Waste of time," he said. "You'd know
more at the end of it, if you went into the House at once. You take the
matter too seriously."

"No doubt."

For fully a minute Lord Valleys made no answer; he felt almost ruffled.
Waiting till the sensation had passed, he said: "Well, my dear fellow, as
you please."

Miltoun's apprenticeship to the profession of politics was served in a
slum settlement; on his father's estates; in Chambers at the Temple; in
expeditions to Germany, America, and the British Colonies; in work at
elections; and in two forlorn hopes to capture a constituency which could
be trusted not to change its principles. He read much, slowly, but with
conscientious tenacity, poetry, history, and works on philosophy,
religion, and social matters.

Fiction, and especially foreign fiction, he did not care for. With the
utmost desire to be wide and impartial, he sucked in what ministered to
the wants of his nature, rejecting unconsciously all that by its
unsuitability endangered the flame of his private spirit. What he read,
in fact, served only to strengthen those profounder convictions which
arose from his temperament. With a contempt of the vulgar gewgaws of
wealth and rank he combined a humble but intense and growing conviction
of his capacity for leadership, of a spiritual superiority to those whom
he desired to benefit. There was no trace, indeed, of the common
Pharisee in Miltoun, he was simple and direct; but his eyes, his
gestures, the whole man, proclaimed the presence of some secret spring of
certainty, some fundamental well into which no disturbing glimmers
penetrated. He was not devoid of wit, but he was devoid of that kind of
wit which turns its eyes inward, and sees something of the fun that lies
in being what you are. Miltoun saw the world and all the things thereof
shaped like spires--even when they were circles. He seemed to have no
sense that the Universe was equally compounded of those two symbols,
whose point of reconciliation had not yet been discovered.

Such was he, then, when the Member for his native division was made a
peer.

He had reached the age of thirty without ever having been in love,
leading a life of almost savage purity, with one solitary breakdown.
Wome