“Turn your chair around towards me,” she invited.  “This is the hour I like best of any during the day.  Do you see what a beautiful view I have of the Houses of Parliament?  And there across the river, behind that mist, the cesspool begins.  Sometimes I lie here and think.  I see right into Bermondsey and Rotherhithe and all those places and think out the lives of the people as they are being lived.  Then I look through those wonderful windows there—­how they glitter in the sunshine, don’t they!—­and I think I hear the men speak whom they have sent to plead their cause.  Some Demosthenes from Tower Hill exhausts himself with phrase-making, shouts himself into a perspiration, drawing lurid, pictures of hideous and apparent wrongs, and a hundred or so well-dressed legislators whisper behind the palms of their hands, make their plans for the evening and trot into their appointed lobbies like sheep when the division bell rings.  It is the most tragical epitome of inadequacy the world has ever known.”

“Have you Democrats any fresh inspiration, then?” he asked.

“Of course we have,” she rapped out sharply.  “It isn’t like you to ask such a question.  The principles for which we stand never existed before, except academically.  No party has ever been able to preach them within the realm of practical politics, because no party has been comprehensive enough.  The Labour Party, as it was understood ten years ago, was a pitiful conglomeration of selfish atoms without the faintest idea of coordination.  It is for the souls of the people we stand, we Democrats, whether they belong to trades unions or not, whether they till the fields or sweat in the factories, whether they bend over a desk or go back and forth across the sea, whether they live in small houses or large, whether they belong to the respectable middle classes whom the after-the-war legislation did its best to break, or to the class of actual manual laborers.”

“I don’t see what place a man like Miller has in your scheme of things,” he observed, a little restlessly.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Miller is a limpet,” she said.  “He has posed as a man of brains for half a generation.  His only real cleverness is an unerring but selfish capacity for attaching himself to the right cause.  We can’t ignore him.  He has a following.  On the other hand, he does not represent our principles any more than Pitt would if he were still alive.”

“What will be your position really as regards the two main sections of the Labour Party?” he asked.  “We are absorbing the best of them, day by day,” she answered quickly.  “What is left of either will be merely the scum.  The people will come to us.  Their discarded leaders can crawl back to obscurity.  The people may follow false gods for a very long time, but they have the knack of recognising the truth when it is shown them.”

“You have the gift of conviction,” he said thoughtfully.