nt, he gained his seat for Vauxhall at the election of 1874,
and from the day of his success he steadily applied himself to the
political profession. He was then two-and-thirty; for twelve years he
had been actively engaged in commerce and now held the position of
senior partner in a firm owning several factories in Lambeth. Such a
training was valuable; politics he viewed as business on a larger
scale, and business, the larger its scale the better, was his one
enthusiasm. His education had not been liberal; he saw that that made
no difference, and wisely pursued the bent of his positive mind where
another man might have wasted his time in the attempt to gain culture.
He saw that his was the age of the practical. Let who would be an
idealist, the practical man in the end got all that was worth having.

He worked. You might have seen him, for instance, in his study one
Sunday morning in the January which the story has now reached; a glance
at him showed that he was no idler in fields of art or erudition;
blue-books were heaped about him, hooks bound in law calf lay open near
his hand, newspapers monopolised one table. He was interested in all
that concerns the industrial population of Great Britain; he was making
that subject his speciality; he meant to link his name with factory
Acts, with education Acts, with Acts for the better housing of the
work-folk, with what not of the kind. And the single working man for
whom he veritably cared one jot was Mr. James Dalmaine.

He was rather a good-looking fellow, a well-built, sound, red-bearded
Englishman. His ears were not quite so close against his head as they
should be; his lips might have had a more urbane expression; his hand
might have been a trifle less weighty; but when he stood up with his
back to the fire and looked musingly along the cornice of the room, one
felt that his appearance on a platform would conciliate those
right-thinking electors who desire that Parliament should represent the
comely, beef-fed British breed. He was fairly well-to-do, though some
held that he had speculated a little rashly of late; he felt very
strongly, however, that his pedestal must be yet more solid before he
could claim the confidence of his countrymen with the completeness that
he desired. Of late he had given thought to a particular scheme, and
not at all a disagreeable one, for enhancing his social, and therefore
political, credit. He was thinking of her--the scheme, I would say-