“Steady on,” Miller interrupted, suddenly sitting up in his chair.  “Look here, Tallente—­”

“Be quiet until I have finished,” Tallente went on.  “He was concerned in no end of intrigue with Austrian and German Socialists for embarrassing the Government and bringing the war to an end.  I should say that but for the fact that our Government at the time was wholly one of compromise, and was leaning largely upon the Labour vote, he would have been impeached for high treason.”

Miller, who had been busy rolling a cigarette, lit it with ostentatious carelessness.

“And what of all this?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” Tallente replied, “except that it seems a strange thing to find you now associated with a party who threaten me openly with political extinction unless I choose to join them.  I call this junkerdom, not socialism.”

“No man’s principles can remain stable in an unstable world,” Miller pronounced.  “I still detest force and compulsion of every sort, but I recognise its necessity in our present civil life far more than I did in a war which was, after all, a war of politicians.”

Nora Miall leaned over from her chair and laid her hand on Tallente’s arm.  After Miller’s raucous tones, her voice sounded almost like music.

“Mr. Tallente,” she said, “I can understand your feeling aggrieved.  You are not a man whom it is easy to threaten, but remember that after all we must go on our fixed way towards the appointed goal.  And—­consider—­isn’t the upraised rod for your good?  Your place is with us—­indeed it is.  I fancy that Stephen here forgets that you are not yet fully acquainted with our real principles and aims.  A political party cannot be judged from the platform.  The views expressed there have to be largely governed by the character of the audience.  It is to the textbooks of our creed, Dartrey’s textbooks, that you should turn.”

“I have read your views on certain social matters, Miss Miall,” Tallente observed, turning towards her.

She laughed understandingly.  Her eyes twinkled as she looked at him.

“And thoroughly disapproved them, of course!  But you know, Mr. Tallente, we are out not to reconstruct Society but to lay the stepping stones for a reconstruction.  That is all, I suppose, that any single generation could accomplish.  The views which I have advocated in the Universal Review are the views which will be accepted as a matter of course in fifty years’ time.  To-day they seem crude and unmoral, chiefly because the casual reader, especially the British reader, dwells so much upon external effects and thinks so little of the soul that lies below.  Even you, Mr. Tallente, with your passion for order and your distrust of all change in established things, can scarcely consider our marriage laws an entire success?”

Tallente winced a little and Dartrey hastily intervened.