Conservatism....

It was queer to hear once more, after my Asiatic wanderings and
dreamings, those West-End dinner-table politics, those speculations
about "Winston's" future and the possibility of Lloyd George or Ramsay
Macdonald or Macnamara taking office with the Liberals and whether there
might not ultimately be a middle party in which Haldane and Balfour,
Grey and the Cecils could meet upon common ground. It seemed now not
only very small but very far off. She told me too of the huge popularity
of King Edward. He had proved to be interested, curious, understanding
and clever, an unexpectedly successful King. She described how he was
breaking out of the narrow official limits that had kept his mother in a
kind of social bandbox, extending his solvent informality of
friendliness to all sorts of men. He had won the heart of Will Crooks,
the labor member for Poplar, for example, made John Burns a social
success and warmed all France for England.

I surveyed this novel picture of the English throne diffusing
amiability.

"I suppose it's what the throne ought to do," said Rachel. "If it can't
be inspiration, at any rate it can tolerate and reconcile and take the
ill-bred bitterness out of politics."

"My father might have said that."

"I got that from your father," she said; and added after a momentary
pause, "I go over and talk to him."

"You talk to my father!"

"I like to. Or rather I listen and take it in. I go over in the
afternoon. I go sometimes twice or three times a week."

"That's kind of you."

"Not at all. You see---- It sounds impudent, I know, for a girl to say
so, but we've so many interests in common."

Sec. 2

I was more and more interested by Rachel as the days went on. A man must
be stupid who does not know that a woman is happy in his presence, and
for two years now and more I had met no one with a very strong personal
feeling for me. And quite apart from that, her mind was extraordinarily
interesting to me because it was at once so active and so clear and so
limited by her entirely English circumstances. She had the prosperous
English outlook. She didn't so much see the wide world as get glimpses
of it through the tangle of Westminster and of West End and week-end
limitations. She wasn't even aware of that greater unprosperous England,
already sulking and darkling outside her political world, that greater
England which was presently to make its first audible intimations of
disconten