ntioned politics."

"You made us forget them," Tallente murmured.

"A left-handed compliment," Jane laughed. "You should pay your tribute
to my cook. Mr. Dartrey, I have told you all about my farms and your
wife has explained all that I could not understand of her last article
in the National. Now I am going to seek for further enlightenment.
Tell my why the publication of an article written years ago is likely to
affect Mr. Tallente's present position so much?"

"Because," Dartrey explained, "it is an attack upon the most sensitive,
the most difficult, and the section of our party furthest removed from
us--the great trades unions. Some years ago, Lady Jane, since the war,
one of our shrewdest thinkers declared that the greatest danger
overshadowing this country was the power wielded by the representatives
of these various unions, a power which amounted almost to a
dictatorship. We have drawn them into our party through detaching the
units. We have never been able to capture them as a whole. Even to-day
their leaders are in a curiously anomalous position. They see their
power going in the dawn of a more socialistic age. They cannot refuse
to accept our principles but in their hearts they know that our triumph
sounds the death knell to their power. This article of Tallente's would
give them a wonderful chance. Out of very desperation they will seize
upon it."

"Have you read the article?" Jane enquired.

"This evening, just before I came," Dartrey replied gravely.

"I can understand," Tallente intervened, "that you feel bound to take
this seriously, Dartrey, but after all there is nothing traitorous to
our cause in what I wrote. I attacked the trades unions for their
colossal and fiendish selfishness when the Empire was tottering. I
would do it again under the same circumstances. Remember I was fresh
from Ypres. I had seen Englishmen, not soldiers but just hastily
trained citizens--bakers, commercial travellers, clerks, small
tradesmen--butchered like rabbits but fighting for their country, dying
for it--and all the time those blackguardly stump orators at home turned
their backs to France and thought the time opportune to wrangle for a
rise in wages and bring the country to the very verge of a universal
strike. It didn't come off, I know, but there were very few people who
really understood how near we were to it. Dartrey, we sacrifice too
much of our real feelings to political necessity. I won't apologize for
my