"Dear me, how untidy
everything is!"

She moved about, altering the furniture a little, making little piles of
the magazines, a graceful, elegant figure in her dark velvet house
dress, with a thin band of fur at the neck. She turned suddenly around
and found him watching her. This time she laughed at him frankly.

"Sit down at once," she ordered, motioning him back to his easy-chair
and coming herself to a corner of the lounge. "Remember that you have a
great deal to tell me and explain. The newspapers say such queer
things. Is it true that I really am entertaining a possible future
Prime Minister?"

"I suppose that might be," he answered, a little vaguely, his eyes still
fixed upon her. "So this is your room. I like it. And I like--"

"Well, go on, please," she begged.

"I like the softness of your gown, and I like the fur against your
throat and neck, and I like those buckles on your shoes, and the way you
do your hair."

She laughed, gracefully enough, yet with some return to that note of
uneasiness.

"You mustn't turn my head!" she protested. "You, fresh from London,
which they tell me is terribly gay just now! I want to understand just
what it means, your throwing in your lot with the Democrats. My uncle
says, for instance, that you have abandoned respectable politics to
become a Tower Hill pedagogue."

"Respectable politics," he replied, "if by that you mean the present
government of the country, have been in the wrong hands for so long that
people scarcely realise what is undoubtedly the fact--that the country
isn't being governed at all. A Government with an Opposition Party
almost as powerful as itself, all made up of separate parties which are
continually demanding sops, can scarcely progress very far, can it?"

"But the Democrats," she ventured, "are surely only one of these
isolated parties?"

"I have formed a different idea of their strength," he answered. "I
believe that if a general election took place to-morrow, the Democrats
would sweep the country. I believe that we should have the largest
working majority any Government has had since the war."

"How terrible!" she murmured, involuntarily truthful.

"Your tame socialism isn't equal to the prospect," he remarked, a little
bitterly.

"My tame socialism, as you call it," she replied, "draws the line at
seeing the country governed by one class of person only, and that class
the one who has the least at stake in it."

"Lady Jane," he said