He had, no doubt, been anxious, as a keen member of the advanced group, that Marsham should finally commit himself to the programme of the Left Wing, with which he had been so long coquetting.  Oliver had a considerable position in the House, and was, moreover, a rich man.  Rich men had not, so far, been common in the advanced section of the party.  Lankester, in whom the idealist and the wire-puller were shrewdly mixed, was well aware that the reforms he desired could only be got by extensive organization; and he knew precisely what the money cost of getting them would be.  Rich men, therefore, were the indispensable tools of his ideas; and among his own group he who had never possessed a farthing of his own apart from the earnings of his brain and pen was generally set on to capture them.

Was that really why he had come down?—­to make sure of this rich Laodicean?  Lankester fell into a reverie.

He was a man of curious gifts and double personality.  It was generally impossible to lure him, on any pretext, from the East End and the House of Commons.  He lived in a block of model dwellings in a street opening out of the East India Dock Road, and his rooms, whenever he was at home, were overrun by children from the neighboring tenements.  To them he was all gentleness and fun, while his command of invective in a public meeting was little short of terrible.  Great ladies and the country-houses courted him because of a certain wit, a certain charm—­above all, a certain spiritual power—­which piqued the worldling.  He flouted and refused the great ladies—­with a smile, however, which gave no offence; and he knew, notwithstanding, everybody whom he wanted to know.  Occasionally he made quiet spaces in his life, and disappeared from London for days or weeks.  When he reappeared it was often with a battered and exhausted air, as of one from whom virtue had gone out.  He was, in truth, a mystic of a secular kind:  very difficult to class religiously, though he called himself a member of the Society of Friends.  Lady Lucy, who was of Quaker extraction, recognized in his ways and phrases echoes from the meetings and influences of her youth.  But, in reality, he was self-taught and self-formed, on the lines of an Evangelical tradition, which had owed something, a couple of generations back, among his Danish forebears, to the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg.  This tradition had not only been conveyed to him by a beloved and saintly mother; it had been appropriated by the man’s inmost forces.  What he believed in, with all mystics, was prayer—­an intimate and ineffable communion between the heart and God.  Lying half asleep on the House of Commons benches, or strolling on the Terrace, he pursued often an inner existence, from which he could spring in a moment to full mundane life—­arguing passionately for some Socialist proposal, scathing an opponent, or laughing and “ragging” with a group of friends, like a school-boy on an exeat.