fix the conditions of his labour, and to the vision lightly and simply touched of the regenerate working home of the future, inhabited by free men, dedicated to something beyond the first brutal necessities of the bodily life, possessed indeed of its proper share of the human inheritance of leisure, knowledge, and delight—­the crowded benches before and behind him grudged him none of it.  The House of Commons is not tolerant of “flights,” except from its chartered masters.  But this young man had earned his flight; and they heard him patiently.  For the rest, the Government had been most attractively wooed; and the Liberal party in the midst of much plain speaking had been treated on the whole with a deference and a forbearance that had long been conspicuously lacking in the utterances of the Labour men.

“‘The mildest mannered man’ et cetera!” said a smiling member of the late Government to a companion on the front Opposition bench, as Wharton sat down amid the general stir and movement which betoken the break-up of a crowded House, and the end of a successful speech which people are eager to discuss in the lobbies.  “A fine performance, eh?  Great advance on anything last year.”

“Bears about as much relation to facts as I do to the angels!” growled the man addressed.

“What! as bad as that?” said the other, laughing.  “Look! they have put up old Denny.  I think I shall stay and hear him.”  And he laid down his hat again which he had taken up.

Meanwhile Marcella in the Ladies’ Gallery had thrown herself back in her chair with a long breath.

“How can one listen to anything else!” she said; and for a long time she sat staring at the House without hearing a word of what the very competent, caustic, and well-informed manufacturer on the Government side was saying.  Every dramatic and aesthetic instinct she possessed—­and she was full of them—­had been stirred and satisfied by the speech and the speaker.

But more than that.  He had spoken for the toiler and the poor; his peroration above all had contained tones and accents which were in fact the products of something perfectly sincere in the speaker’s motley personality; and this girl, who in her wild way had given herself to the poor, had followed him with all her passionate heart.  Yet, at the same time, with an amount of intellectual dissent every now and then as to measures and methods, a scepticism of detail which astonished herself!  A year before she had been as a babe beside him, whether in matters of pure mind or of worldly experience.  Now she was for the first time conscious of a curious growth—­independence.

But the intellectual revolt, such as it was, was lost again, as soon as it arose, in the general impression which the speech had left upon her—­in this warm quickening of the pulses, this romantic interest in the figure, the scene, the young emerging personality.