The statesman shook his head pleasantly.

“The details are a little vague still, I grant you,” said Wharton, smiling.

“And you think the principle matters twopence without the details?  I have always found that the difficulty with the Christian command, ’Be ye perfect.’  The principle doesn’t trouble me at all!”

The swaying of the entering throng parted the two speakers, and for a second or two the portly host followed with his eye the fair profile and lightly-built figure of the younger man as they receded from him in the crowd.  It was in his mind that the next twenty years, whether this man or that turned out to be important or no, must see an enormous quickening of the political pace.  He himself was not conscious of any jealousy of the younger men; but neither did he see among them any commanding personality.  This young fellow, with his vivacity, his energy, and his Socialist whims, was interesting enough; and his problem was interesting—­the problem of whether he could make a party out of the heterogeneous group of which he was turning out to be indisputably the ablest member.  But what was there certain or inevitable about his future after all?  And it was the same with all the rest.  Whereas the leaders of the past had surely announced themselves beyond mistake from the beginning.  He was inclined to think, however, that we were levelling up rather than levelling down.  The world grew too clever, and leadership was more difficult every day.

Meanwhile Wharton found his progress through these stately rooms extremely pleasant.  He was astonished at the multitude of people he knew, at the numbers of faces that smiled upon him.  Presently, after half an hour of hard small talk, he found himself for a moment without an acquaintance, leaning against an archway between two rooms, and free to watch the throng.  Self-love, “that froward presence, like a chattering child within us,” was all alert and happy.  A feeling of surprise, too, which had not yet worn away.  A year before he had told Marcella Boyce, and with conviction, that he was an outcast from his class.  He smiled now at that past naivete which had allowed him to take the flouts of his country neighbours and his mother’s unpopularity with her aristocratic relations for an index of the way in which “society” in general would be likely to treat him and his opinions.  He now knew, on the contrary, that those opinions had been his best advertisement.  Few people, it appeared, were more in demand among the great than those who gave it out that they would, if they could, abolish the great.

“It’s because they’re not enough afraid of us—­yet,” he said to himself, not without spleen.  “When we really get to business—­if we ever do—­I shall not be coming to Lady Cradock’s parties.”

“Mr. Wharton, do you ever do such a frivolous thing as go to the theatre?” said a pretty, languishing creature at his elbow, the wife of a London theatrical manager.  “Suppose you come and see us in ’The Minister’s Wooing,’ first night next Saturday.  I’ve got one seat in my box, for somebody very agreeable.  Only it must be somebody who can appreciate my frocks!”