hief reasons, I
have heard, he gave for thus absenting himself was that he could not
stand the talk from the opposite side--it made him so angry.

[Sidenote: Joe's motives.]

But there were other and more immediate reasons for his anger with the
_Daily News_. Joe was conscious of the growth of two feelings--either of
which was very perilous to him. First, he began uneasily to feel that
the country--watching the struggle between him and the Old Man--was
getting a little disgusted at the business; and saw in it a want of that
chivalry and fair play which it desires to see even in the fiercest
political controversy. This was not a pleasant sentiment to have growing
up against one; and Joe felt that it has serious perils to his future
political position. And, secondly, he was conscious that the majority of
the House of Commons was growing very restive under the desperate
obstruction of which he had made himself the champion, and that this
feeling might soon become strong enough to carry Mr. Gladstone and the
Ministers off their feet, and compel drastic measures which had hitherto
been steadily refrained from. This would not suit the book of Joe at
all, whose object it was to keep the struggle going as long as he
possibly could manage it, careless of the traditions of Parliament, of
the dignity and decency of the House of Commons, of the life and
strength of Mr. Gladstone, of everything except his own greedy desire
for personal revenge and triumph.

[Sidenote: Mr. Gladstone's gentleness.]

This was what lay behind the plausible and honeyed words in which Mr.
Chamberlain attacked the article in the _Daily News_. And here a curious
difficulty arose which rather helped Joe, and almost enabled him to
score a great triumph. Everybody knows that between the temper of Mr.
Gladstone and that of his friends and supporters there is an impassable
gulf. That mastery of a vulnerable temper, which accounted for many of
the troubles of his earlier political career, which he himself has
acknowledged in many a pathetic passage in his correspondence--that
mastery of the vulnerable temper is now so complete that the Old Man
glides through scenes of insult and passes over what the humblest member
of the House would often find it hard to endure. There is something
indeed strange, wistful, almost uncanny, in the unbreakable gentleness
of that white figure, with the ivory complexion, the scant white hair,
the large white collar and broad white