“I don’t want to hear any more,” Miller interrupted.  “It’s time we had this out.  I object to Tallente being placed at the head of the party.”

“And why?” Dartrey asked coldly.

“Because he is a newcomer and has done nothing to earn such a position,” Miller declared; “because he has come to us as an opportunist, because there are others who have served the cause of the people for all the years of their life, who have a better claim; and because at heart, mind you, Dartrey, he isn’t a people’s man.”

“What do you mean by saying that I am not a people’s man?” Tallente demanded.

“Just what the words indicate,” was the almost fierce reply.  “You’re Eton and Oxford, not board-school and apprentice.  Your brain brings you to the cause of the people, not your heart.  You aren’t one of us and never could be.  You’re an aristocrat, and before we knew where we were, you’d be legislating for aristocrats.  You’d try and sneak them into your Cabinet.  It’s their atmosphere you’ve been brought up in.  It’s with them you want to live.  That’s what I mean when I say that you’re not a people’s man, Tallente, and I defy any one to say that you are.”

“Miller,” Dartrey intervened earnestly, “you are expounding a case from the narrowest point of view.  You say that Tallente was born an aristocrat.  That may or may not be true, but surely it makes his espousal of the people’s cause all the more honest and convincing?  For you to say that he is not a people’s man, you who have heard his speeches in the house, who have read his pamphlets, who have followed, as you must have followed, his political career is sheer folly.”

“Then I am content to remain a fool,” Miller rejoined.  “Once and for all, I decline to serve under Tallente, and I warn you that if you put him forward, if you go so far, even, as to give him a seat in the Cabinet of the Government it is your job to form, you will disunite the party and bring calamity upon us.”

“Have you any further reason for your attitude,” Tallente asked pointedly, “except those you have put forward?”

Miller met his questioner’s earnest gaze defiantly.

“I have,” he admitted.

“State it now, then, please.”

Miller rose to his feet.  He became a little oratorical, more than usually artificial.

“I make my appeal to you, Dartrey,” he said.  “You have put forward this man as your choice of a leader of the great Democratic Party, the party which is to combine all branches of Labour, the party which is to stand for the people.  I charge him with having written in the last year of the war a scathing attack upon the greatest of British institutions, the trades unions, an article written from the extreme aristocratic standpoint, an article which, if published to-day and distributed broadcast amongst the miners and operatives of the north, would result in a revolution if his name were persisted in.”