o belong,
somehow or other, to the days of Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen. I
suppose that is because I always feel that I am living a little way in
the future."

Tea was brought in, and a place cleared for the tray upon a crowded
table. Afterwards she lit a cigarette and threw herself upon the
lounge.

"Turn your chair around towards me," she invited. "This is the hour I
like best of any during the day. Do you see what a beautiful view I
have of the Houses of Parliament? And there across the river, behind
that mist, the cesspool begins. Sometimes I lie here and think. I see
right into Bermondsey and Rotherhithe and all those places and think out
the lives of the people as they are being lived. Then I look through
those wonderful windows there--how they glitter in the sunshine, don't
they!--and I think I hear the men speak whom they have sent to plead
their cause. Some Demosthenes from Tower Hill exhausts himself with
phrase-making, shouts himself into a perspiration, drawing lurid,
pictures of hideous and apparent wrongs, and a hundred or so
well-dressed legislators whisper behind the palms of their hands, make
their plans for the evening and trot into their appointed lobbies like
sheep when the division bell rings. It is the most tragical epitome of
inadequacy the world has ever known."

"Have you Democrats any fresh inspiration, then?" he asked.

"Of course we have," she rapped out sharply. "It isn't like you to ask
such a question. The principles for which we stand never existed
before, except academically. No party has ever been able to preach them
within the realm of practical politics, because no party has been
comprehensive enough. The Labour Party, as it was understood ten years
ago, was a pitiful conglomeration of selfish atoms without the faintest
idea of coordination. It is for the souls of the people we stand, we
Democrats, whether they belong to trades unions or not, whether they
till the fields or sweat in the factories, whether they bend over a desk
or go back and forth across the sea, whether they live in small houses
or large, whether they belong to the respectable middle classes whom the
after-the-war legislation did its best to break, or to the class of
actual manual laborers."

"I don't see what place a man like Miller has in your scheme of things,"
he observed, a little restlessly.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Miller is a limpet," she said. "He has posed as a man of brains for
half a g