ger to discuss in the lobbies. "A fine performance, eh? Great advance
on anything last year."

"Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels!" growled
the man addressed.

"What! as bad as that?" said the other, laughing. "Look! they have put
up old Denny. I think I shall stay and hear him." And he laid down his
hat again which he had taken up.

Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies' Gallery had thrown herself back in her
chair with a long breath.

"How can one listen to anything else!" she said; and for a long time she
sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the very
competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government
side was saying. Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she
possessed--and she was full of them--had been stirred and satisfied by
the speech and the speaker.

But more than that. He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his
peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact
the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker's motley
personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the
poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart. Yet, at the same
time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to
measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself! A
year before she had been as a babe beside him, whether in matters of
pure mind or of worldly experience. Now she was for the first time
conscious of a curious growth--independence.

But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as
it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon
her--in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in
the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.

Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement. She and her
brothers were typical Venturists--a little cynical, therefore, towards
all the world, friend or foe. A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and
a cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it
down--through him--as a first law, that sentiment in public is the
abominable thing. Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was
little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.

"There!" said Marcella, with relief, "that's done. Now, who's this? That
man _Wilkins_!"

Her tone showed her disgust. Wilkins had sprung up the instant Wharton's
Conservative opponent had given the f