The Fact published a cheery series of articles, dealing with each clause in turn, and explaining why it was bound to lead, immediately or ultimately, to war with some one or other.  I wrote some of them myself.  But I was out on some points, though most haven’t had time yet to prove themselves.

‘Now,’ said Jane, the day after the signature, ’I suppose we can get on with the things that matter.’

She meant housing, demobilisation, proportional representation, health questions, and all the good objects which the Society for Equal Citizenship had at heart.  She had been writing some articles in the Daily Haste on these.  They were well-informed and intelligent, but not expert enough for the Fact.  And that, as I began to see, was partly where Hobart came in.  Jane wrote cleverly, clearly, and concisely—­better than Johnny did.  But, in these days of overcrowded competent journalism —­well, it is not unwise to marry an editor of standing.  It gives you a better place in the queue.

I dined at the Hobarts’ on June 29th, for the first time since their marriage.  We were a party of six.  Katherine Varick was there, and a distinguished member of the American Legation and his wife.

Jane handled her parties competently, as she did other things.  A vivid, jolly child she looked, in love with life and the fun and importance of her new position.  The bachelor girl or man just married is an amusing study to me.  Especially the girl, with her new responsibilities, her new and more significant relation to life and society.  Later she is sadly apt to become dull, to have her individuality merged in the eternal type of the matron and the mother; her intellect is apt to lose its edge, her mind its grip.  It is the sacrifice paid by the individual to the race.  But at first she is often a delightful combination of keen-witted, jolly girl and responsible woman.

We talked, I remember, partly about the Government, and how soon Northcliffe would succeed in turning it out.  The Pinkerton press was giving its support to the Government.  The Weekly Fact was not.  But we didn’t want them out at once; we wanted to keep them on until some one of constructive ability, in any party, was ready to take the reins.  The trouble about the Labour people was that so far there was no one of constructive ability; they were manifestly unready.  They had no one good enough.  No party had.  It was the old problem, never acuter, of ’Produce the Man.’  If Labour was to produce him, I suspected that it would take it at least a generation of hard political training and education.  If Labour had got in then, it would have been a mob of uneducated and uninformed sentimentalists, led and used by a few trained politicians who knew the tricks of the trade.  It would be far better for them to wait till the present generation of honest mediocrities died out, and a new and differently educated generation were ready to take hold.  University-trained Labour—­that bugbear of Barnes’—­if there is any hope for the British Constitution, which probably there is not, I believe it lies there.  It is a very small one, at the best.  Anyhow, it certainly did not, at this period, lie in the parliamentary Labour Party, that body of incompetents in an incompetent House.