Edith Craven looked at her with wondering amusement.  She and her brothers were typical Venturists—­a little cynical, therefore, towards all the world, friend or foe.  A Venturist is a Socialist minus cant, and a cause which cannot exist at all without a passion of sentiment lays it down—­through him—­as a first law, that sentiment in public is the abominable thing.  Edith Craven thought that after all Marcella was little less raw and simple now than she had been in the old days.

“There!” said Marcella, with relief, “that’s done.  Now, who’s this?  That man Wilkins!”

Her tone showed her disgust.  Wilkins had sprung up the instant Wharton’s Conservative opponent had given the first decisive sign of sitting down.  Another man on the same side was also up, but Wilkins, black and frowning, held his own stubbornly, and his rival subsided.

With the first sentences of the new speech the House knew that it was to have an emotion, and men came trooping in again.  And certainly the short stormy utterance was dramatic enough.  Dissent on the part of an important north-country Union from some of the most vital machinery of the bill which had been sketched by Wharton—­personal jealousy and distrust of the mover of the resolution—­denial of his representative place, and sneers at his kid-gloved attempts to help a class with which he had nothing to do—­the most violent protest against the servility with which he had truckled to the now effete party of free contract and political enfranchisement—­and the most passionate assertion that between any Labour party, worthy of the name, and either of the great parties of the past there lay and must lie a gulf of hatred, unfathomable and unquenchable, till Labour had got its rights, and landlord, employer, and dividend-hunter were trampled beneath its heel—­all these ugly or lurid things emerged with surprising clearness from the torrent of north-country speech.  For twenty minutes Nehemiah Wilkins rioted in one of the best “times” of his life.  That he was an orator thousands of working men had borne him witness again and again; and in his own opinion he had never spoken better.

The House at first enjoyed its sensation.  Then, as the hard words rattled on, it passed easily into the stage of amusement.  Lady Cradock’s burly husband bent forward from the front Opposition bench, caught Wharton’s eye, and smiled, as though to say:  “What!—­you haven’t even been able to keep up appearances so far!” And Wilkins’s final attack upon the Liberals—­who, after ruining their own chances and the chances of the country, were now come cap in hand to the working man whining for his support as their only hope of recovery—­was delivered to a mocking chorus of laughter and cheers, in the midst of which, with an angry shake of his great shoulders, he flung himself down on his seat.