uestions, and all the good objects which the Society for Equal
Citizenship had at heart. She had been writing some articles in the
_Daily Haste_ on these. They were well-informed and intelligent, but not
expert enough for the _Fact_. And that, as I began to see, was partly
where Hobart came in. Jane wrote cleverly, clearly, and concisely--better
than Johnny did. But, in these days of overcrowded competent journalism
--well, it is not unwise to marry an editor of standing. It gives you a
better place in the queue.

I dined at the Hobarts' on June 29th, for the first time since their
marriage. We were a party of six. Katherine Varick was there, and a
distinguished member of the American Legation and his wife.

Jane handled her parties competently, as she did other things. A vivid,
jolly child she looked, in love with life and the fun and importance of
her new position. The bachelor girl or man just married is an amusing
study to me. Especially the girl, with her new responsibilities, her new
and more significant relation to life and society. Later she is sadly apt
to become dull, to have her individuality merged in the eternal type of
the matron and the mother; her intellect is apt to lose its edge, her
mind its grip. It is the sacrifice paid by the individual to the race.
But at first she is often a delightful combination of keen-witted, jolly
girl and responsible woman.

We talked, I remember, partly about the Government, and how soon
Northcliffe would succeed in turning it out. The Pinkerton press was
giving its support to the Government. The _Weekly Fact_ was not. But we
didn't want them out at once; we wanted to keep them on until some one of
constructive ability, in any party, was ready to take the reins. The
trouble about the Labour people was that so far there was no one of
constructive ability; they were manifestly unready. They had no one good
enough. No party had. It was the old problem, never acuter, of 'Produce
the Man.' If Labour was to produce him, I suspected that it would take it
at least a generation of hard political training and education. If Labour
had got in then, it would have been a mob of uneducated and uninformed
sentimentalists, led and used by a few trained politicians who knew the
tricks of the trade. It would be far better for them to wait till the
present generation of honest mediocrities died out, and a new and
differently educated generation were ready to take hold.
University-trained La