with megalomania.  It was swaggering, it was greed, it was German; its enthusiasm was forced, its nobility a vulgar lie.  No.  And when he turned to the opposite party he found little that was more attractive.  They were prepared, it seemed, if they came into office, to pull the legislature of the British Isles to pieces in obedience to the Irish demand for Home Rule, and they were totally unprepared with any scheme for doing this that had even a chance of success.  In the twenty years that had elapsed since Gladstone’s hasty and disastrous essay in political surgery they had studied nothing, learnt nothing, produced no ideas whatever in the matter.  They had not had the time.  They had just negotiated, like the mere politicians they were, for the Nationalist vote.  They seemed to hope that by a marvel God would pacify Ulster.  Lord Dunraven, Plunkett, were voices crying in the wilderness.  The sides in the party game would as soon have heeded a poet. . . .  But unless Benham was prepared to subscribe either to Home Rule or Tariff Reform there was no way whatever open to him into public life.  He had had some decisive conversations.  He had no illusions left upon that score. . . .

Here was the real barrier that had kept him inactive for ten months.  Here was the problem he had to solve.  This was how he had been left out of active things, a prey to distractions, excitements, idle temptations—­and Mrs. Skelmersdale.

Running away to shoot big game or explore wildernesses was no remedy.  That was just running away.  Aristocrats do not run away.  What of his debt to those men down there in the quarry?  What of his debt to the unseen men in the mines away in the north?  What of his debt to the stokers on the liners, and to the clerks in the city?  He reiterated the cardinal article of his creed:  The aristocrat is a privileged man in order that he may be a public and political man.

But how is one to be a political man when one is not in politics?

Benham frowned at the Weald.  His ideas were running thin.

He might hammer at politics from the outside.  And then again how?  He would make a list of all the things that he might do.  For example he might write.  He rested one hand on his knee and lifted one finger and regarded it.  Could he write?  There were one or two men who ran papers and seemed to have a sort of independent influence.  Strachey, for example, with his spectator; Maxse, with his national review.  But they were grown up, they had formed their ideas.  He had to learn first.

He lifted a second finger.  How to learn?  For it was learning that he had to do.

When one comes down from Oxford or Cambridge one falls into the mistake of thinking that learning is over and action must begin.  But until one perceives clearly just where one stands action is impossible.