“There you have me,” he confessed.  “I know a little about everything else you have mentioned.”

“A very good opening.” she approved.  “Keep it till Susan has gone and then propose yourself as a disciple.  There is only one drawback about this place,” she went on, nodding curtly across the room to Miller.  “So many of our own people come here.  Mr. Miller must be pleased to see us together.”

“Why?” Tallente asked.  “Is he an admirer?”

Nora’s face was almost ludicrously expressive.

“He would like to he,” she admitted, “but, thick-skinned though he is, I have managed to make him understand pretty well how I feel about him.  You’ll find him a thorn in your side,” she went on reflectively.

“You see, if our party has a fault, it is in a certain lack of system.  We have only a titular chief and no real leader.  Miller thinks that post is his by predestination.  Your coming is beginning to worry him already.  It was entirely on your account he paid me that visit this afternoon.”

“To be perfectly frank with you,” Tallente sighed, “I should find Miller a loathsome coadjutor.”

“There are drawbacks to everything in life,” Nora replied.  “Long before Miller has become anything except a nuisance to you, you will have realised that the only political party worth considering, during the next fifty years, at any rate, will be the Democrats.  After that, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the aristocrats didn’t engineer a revolution, especially if we disenfranchise them.—­Susan, you have a new hat on.  Tell me at once with whom you are going to Daly’s?”

“No one who counts,” the girl declared, with a little grimace.  “I am going with my brother and a very sober married friend of his.”

“After working hours,” Nora confessed, glancing critically at the sole which had just been tendered for Tallente’s examination, “the chief interest of Susan and myself, as you may have observed, lies in food and in your sex.  I think we must have what some nasty German woman once called the man-hunger.”

“It sounds cannibalistic,” Tallente rejoined.  “Have I any cause for alarm?”

“Not so far as I am concerned,” Susan assured him.  “I have really found my man, only he doesn’t know it yet.  I am trying to get it into his brain by mental suggestion.”

“You wouldn’t think Susan would be so much luckier than I, would you?” Nora observed, studying her friend reflectively.  “I am really much better-looking, but I think she must have more taking ways.  You needn’t be nervous, Mr. Tallente.  You are outside the range of our ambitions.  I shall have to be content with some one in a humbler walk of life.”

“Aren’t you a little over-modest?” he asked.  “You haven’t told me much about the social side of this new era which you propose to inaugurate, but I imagine that intellect will be the only aristocracy.”

“Even then,” Norah sighed, “I am lacking in confidence.  To tell you the truth, I am not a great believer in my own sex.  I don’t see us occupying a very prominent place in the politics of the next few decades.  The functions of woman were decided for her by nature and a million years of revolt will never alter them.”