of course, very
sad. And I am another being in it from what I was at Lady
Winterbourne's. Everything looks differently to me. No, no! you must
please wait till the inner voice speaks so that I can hear it
plainly--for your sake at least as much as for mine. If you persisted in
coming to see me now, I should have to put an end to it all."

"Strange is the modern woman!" thought Wharton to himself, not without
sharp pique, as he pondered that letter in the course of his drive home
from the meeting. "I talk to her of passion, and she asks me in return
why I do things inconsistent with my political opinions! puts me through
a moral catechism, in fact! What is the meaning of it all--confound it!
--her state of mind and mine? Is the good old _ars amandi_ perishing out
of the world? Let some Stendhal come and tell us why!"

But he sat up to answer her, and could not get free from an inward
pleading or wrestle with her, which haunted him through all the
intervals of these rapid days.

Life while they lasted was indeed a gymnast's contest of breath and
endurance. The _Clarion_ made its retreat in Wharton's finest style, and
the fact rang through labouring England. The strike-leaders came up from
the Midlands; Wharton had to see them. He was hotly attacked in the
House privately, and even publicly by certain of his colleagues. Bennett
showed concern and annoyance. Meanwhile the Conservative papers talked
the usual employers' political economy; and the Liberal papers, whose
support of the strike had been throughout perfunctory, and of no
particular use to themselves or to other people, took a lead they were
glad to get, and went in strongly for the award.

Through it all Wharton showed extraordinary skill. The columns of the
_Clarion_ teemed with sympathetic appeals to the strikers, flanked by
long statements of "hard fact"--the details of foreign competition and
the rest, the plans of the masters--freely supplied him by Mr. Pearson.
With Bennett and his colleagues in the House he took a bold line;
admitted that he had endangered his popularity both inside Parliament
and out of it at a particularly critical moment; and implied, though he
did not say, that some men were still capable of doing independent
things to their own hurt. Meanwhile he pushed a number of other matters
to the front, both in the paper and in his own daily doings. He made at
least two important speeches in the provinces, in the course of these
days, on the