ifiable. You and I have
had so much between us beyond what somebody the other day--it was in a
report in the _Times_, I think--was calling _Materia Matrimoniala_. And
of course I hear about you from all sorts of people, and in all sorts
of ways--whatever you have done about me I've had a woman's sense of
honor about you and I've managed to learn a great deal without asking
forbidden questions. I've pricked up my ears at the faintest echo of
your name.

"They say you have become a publisher with an American partner, a sort
of Harmsworth and Nelson and Times Book Club and Hooper and Jackson all
rolled into one. That seems so extraordinary to me that for that alone I
should have had to write to you. I want to know the truth of that. I
never see any advertisement of Stratton & Co. or get any inkling of what
it is you publish. Are you the power behind the respectable Murgatroyd
and the honest Milvain? I know them both and neither has the slightest
appearance of being animated by you. And equally perplexing is your
being mixed up with an American like that man Gidding in Peace
Conferences and Social Reform Congresses and so forth. It's
so--Carnegieish. There I'm surer because I've seen your name in reports
of meetings and I've read your last two papers in the _Fortnightly_. I
can't imagine you of all people, with your touch of reserve, launching
into movements and rubbing shoulders with faddists. What does it mean,
Stephen? I had expected to find you coming back into English
politics--speaking and writing on the lines of your old beginning,
taking up that work you dropped--it's six years now ago. I've been
accumulating disappointment for two years. Mr. Arthur, you see, on our
side,"--this you will remember was in 1909--"still steers our devious
party courses, and the Tariff Reformers have still to capture us. Weston
Massinghay was comparing them the other night, at a dinner at the
Clynes', to a crowded piratical galley trying to get alongside a good
seaman in rough weather. He was very funny about Leo Maxse in the poop,
white and shrieking with passion and the motion, and all the capitalists
armed to the teeth and hiding snug in the hold until the grappling-irons
were fixed.... Why haven't you come into the game? I'd hoped it if only
for the sake of meeting you again. What are you doing out beyond there?

"We are in it so far as I can contrive. But I contrive very little. We
are pillars of the Conservative party--on that Jus