character he had known of old,
and had shrunk from the connection of both with Marcella Boyce in bitter
and insurmountable disgust. A mere Hebraist's mistake!

"That girl's attraction for me was not an attraction of the
senses--except so far that for every normal man and woman charm is
charm, and ginger is hot in the mouth and always will be! What I played
for with her was _power_--power over a nature that piqued and yet by
natural affinity belonged to me. I could not have retained that power,
as it happened, by any bait of passion. Even without the Hurd affair, if
I had gone on to approach her so, her whole moral nature would have
risen against me and her own treachery. I knew that perfectly well, and
took the line I did because for the moment the game was too exciting,
too interesting, to give up. For the moment! then a few days,--a few
weeks later--Good Lord! what stuff we mortals be!"

And he raised his shoulders, mocking, yet by no means disliking his own
idiosyncrasies. It had been strange, indeed, that complete change of
mental emphasis, that alteration of spiritual axis that had befallen him
within the first weeks of his parliamentary life, nay, even before the
Hurd agitation was over. That agitation had brought him vigorously and
profitably into public notice at a convenient moment. But what had
originally sprung from the impulse to retain a hold over a woman, became
in the end the instrument of a new and quite other situation. Wharton
had no sooner entered the House of Commons than he felt himself
strangely at home there. He had the instinct for debate, the instinct
for management, together with a sensitive and contriving ambition. He
found himself possessed for the moment of powers of nervous endurance
that astonished him--a patience of boredom besides, a capacity for
drudgery, and for making the best of dull men. The omens were all
favourable, sometimes startlingly so. He was no longer hampered by the
ill-will of a county or a family connection. Here in this new world,
every man counted strictly for what, in the parliamentary sense, he was
worth. Wharton saw that, owing to his public appearances during the two
preceding years, he was noticed, listened to, talked about in the House,
from the first; and that his position in the newly-formed though still
loosely-bound Labour party was one of indefinite promise. The anxieties
and pitfalls of the position only made it the more absorbing.

The quick, elastic nat