and extravagance from which they
had never recovered. They spent more than they had and they earned more
than they were worth. That is to say, they lived an unnatural life."

"It is fortunate, then," Tallente remarked, "that the new generation is
almost here."

"They, too, carry the taint," Miller insisted. Tallente looked
thoughtfully across towards his host.

"It seems to me that this is a little disheartening," he said. "It is
exactly what one might have expected from Horlock or even Lethbridge.
Miller, who is nearer to the proletariat than any of us, would have us
believe that the people who should be the bulwark of the State are not
fit for their position."

"I fancy," Dartrey said soothingly, "that Miller was talking more as a
philosopher than a practical man."

"I speak according to my experience," the latter insisted, a little
doggedly.

"Amongst your own constituents?" Tallente asked, with a faint smile,
reminiscent of a recent unexpected defeat of one of Miller's partisans
in a large constituency.

"Amongst them and others," was the somewhat acid reply. "Sands lost his
seat at Tenchester through the apathy of the very class for whom we
fight."

"Tenchester is a wonderful place," Nora intervened. "I went down there
lately to study certain phases of women's labour. Their factories are
models and I found all the people with whom I came in contact
exceptionally keen and well-informed."

Miller gnawed his moustache for a moment.

"Then I was probably unpopular there," he said. "I have to tell the
truth. Sometimes people do not like it."

The dinner was simply but daintily served. There were wines of
well-known vintages and as the meal progressed Dartrey unbent. Eating
scarcely anything and drinking less, the purely intellectual stimulus of
conversation seemed to unloose his tongue and give to his pronouncements
a more pungent tone. Naturally, politics remained the subject of
discussion and Dartrey disclosed a little the reason for the meeting
which he had arranged.

"The craft of politics," he pointed out, "makes but one inexorable
demand upon her followers--the demand for unity. The amazing thing is
that this is not generally realised. It seems the fashion, nowadays, to
dissent from everything, to cultivate the ego in its narrowest sense
rather than to try and reach out and grasp the hands of those around.
The fault, I think, is in an over-developed theatrical sense, the desire
which so many cleve