ence, and very few men can truly say
as much. It is on the practical side that I have hitherto been most
deficient. I see my way to correcting that fault. Nothing could be
better for me, just now, than electioneering work. It will take me out
of myself, and give a rest to the speculative side of my mind. Don't
you agree with me?"

"Quite."

"There's another thing I must make clear to you," Dyce pursued, now
swimming delightedly on the flood of his own eloquence. "For a long
time I seriously doubted whether I was fit for a political career. My
ambition always tended that way, but my conscience went against it. I
used to regard politics with a good deal of contempt. You remember our
old talks, at Alverholme?"

Constance nodded.

"In one respect, I am still of the same opinion. Most men who go in for
a parliamentary career regard it either as a business by which they and
their friends are to profit, or as an easy way of gratifying their
personal vanity, and social ambitions. That, of course, is why we are
so far from ideal government. I used to think that the man in earnest
should hold aloof from Parliament, and work in more hopeful ways--by
literature, for instance. But I see now that the fact of the
degradation of Parliament is the very reason why a man thinking as I do
should try to get into the House of Commons. If all serious minds hold
aloof, what will the government of the country sink to? The House of
Commons is becoming in the worst sense democratic; it represents, above
all, newly acquired wealth, and wealth which has no sense of its
responsibilities. The representative system can only be restored to
dignity and usefulness by the growth of a new Liberalism. What I
understand by that, you already know. One of its principles--that which
for the present must be most insisted upon--is the right use of money.
Irresponsible riches threaten to ruin our civilisation. What we have
first of all to do is to form the nucleus of a party which represents
money as a civilising, instead of a corrupting, power."

He looked into Constance's eyes, and she, smiling as if at a distant
object, met his look steadily.

"I have been working out this thought," he continued, with vigorous
accent. "I see it now as my guiding principle in the narrower
sense--the line along which I must pursue the greater ends. The
possession of money commonly says very little for a man's moral and
intellectual worth, but there is the minority of well