What--you are to be in Parliament
and say that this black thing is white, or that this white thing is
black, because you like to take your salary! That cannot be honest!"
Then, when he came to talk to her of money,--that he must give up
Parliament itself, if he gave up his place,--she offered to lend him
money. "Why should you not treat me as a friend?" she said. When he
pointed out to her that there would never come a time in which he
could pay such money back, she stamped her foot and told him that
he had better leave her. "You have high principle," she said, "but
not principle sufficiently high to understand that this thing could
be done between you and me without disgrace to either of us." Then
Phineas assured her with tears in his eyes that such an arrangement
was impossible without disgrace to him.

But he whispered to this new friend no word of the engagement with
his dear Irish Mary. His Irish life, he would tell himself, was a
thing quite apart and separate from his life in England. He said not
a word about Mary Flood Jones to any of those with whom he lived
in London. Why should he, feeling as he did that it would so soon
be necessary that he should disappear from among them? About Miss
Effingham he had said much to Madame Goesler. She had asked him
whether he had abandoned all hope. "That affair, then, is over?" she
had said.

"Yes;--it is all over now."

"And she will marry the red-headed, violent lord?"

"Heaven knows. I think she will. But she is exactly the girl to
remain unmarried if she takes it into her head that the man she likes
is in any way unfitted for her."

"Does she love this lord?"

"Oh yes;--there is no doubt of that." And Phineas, as he made this
acknowledgment, seemed to do so without much inward agony of soul.
When he had been last in London he could not speak of Violet and Lord
Chiltern together without showing that his misery was almost too much
for him.

At this time he received some counsel from two friends. One was
Laurence Fitzgibbon, and the other was Barrington Erle. Laurence had
always been true to him after a fashion, and had never resented his
intrusion at the Colonial Office. "Phineas, me boy," he said, "if all
this is thrue, you're about up a tree."

"It is true that I shall support Monk's motion."

"Then, me boy, you're up a tree as far as office goes. A place like
that niver suited me, because, you see, that poker of a young lord
expected so much of a man; but