He had recovered long ago from that remarkable conception of an active if dishonest political career as a means of escaping Mrs. Skelmersdale and all that Mrs. Skelmersdale symbolized.  That would be just louting from one bad thing to another.  He had to settle Mrs. Skelmersdale clean and right, and he had to do as exquisitely right in politics as he could devise.  If the public life of the country had got itself into a stupid antagonism of two undesirable things, the only course for a sane man of honour was to stand out from the parties and try and get them back to sound issues again.  There must be endless people of a mind with himself in this matter.  And even if there were not, if he was the only man in the world, he still had to follow his lights and do the right.  And his business was to find out the right. . . .

He came back from these imaginative excursions into contemporary politics with one idea confirmed in his mind, an idea that had been indeed already in his mind during his Cambridge days.  This was the idea of working out for himself, thoroughly and completely, a political scheme, a theory of his work and duty in the world, a plan of the world’s future that should give a rule for his life.  The Research Magnificent was emerging.  It was an alarmingly vast proposal, but he could see no alternative but submission, a plebeian’s submission to the currents of life about him.

Little pictures began to flit before his imagination of the way in which he might build up this tremendous inquiry.  He would begin by hunting up people, everybody who seemed to have ideas and promise ideas he would get at.  He would travel far—­and exhaustively.  He would, so soon as the ideas seemed to indicate it, hunt out facts.  He would learn how the world was governed.  He would learn how it did its thinking.  He would live sparingly. ("Not too sparingly,” something interpolated.) He would work ten or twelve hours a day.  Such a course of investigation must pass almost of its own accord into action and realization.  He need not trouble now how it would bring him into politics.  Inevitably somewhere it would bring him into politics.  And he would travel.  Almost at once he would travel.  It is the manifest duty of every young aristocrat to travel.  Here he was, ruling India.  At any rate, passively, through the mere fact of being English, he was ruling India.  And he knew nothing of India.  He knew nothing indeed of Asia.  So soon as he returned to London his preparations for this travel must begin, he must plot out the men to whom he would go, and so contrive that also he would go round the world.  Perhaps he would get Lionel Maxim to go with him.  Or if Maxim could not come, then possibly Prothero.  Some one surely could be found, some one thinking and talking of statecraft and the larger idea of life.  All the world is not swallowed up in every day. . . .

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