“The politician is left with very few luxuries,” Tallente replied, with a certain grimness.

Nora was announced, brilliant and gracious in a new dinner gown which she frankly confessed had ruined her, and close behind her Miller, a little ungainly in his overlong dress coat and badly arranged white tie.  It struck Tallente that he was aware of the object of the meeting and his manner, obviously intended to be ingratiating, had still a touch of self-conscious truculence.

They went into dinner, a few minutes later, and their host’s tact in including Nora in the party was at once apparent.  She talked brightly of the small happenings of their day-by-day political life and bridged over the moments of awkwardness before general conversation assumed its normal swing.  Dartrey encouraged Miller to talk and they all listened while he spoke of the mammoth trades unions of the north, where his hold upon the people was greatest.  He spoke still bitterly of the war, from the moral effect of which, he argued, the working man had never wholly recovered.  Tallente listened a little grimly.

“The fervour of self-sacrifice and so-called patriotism which some of the proletariat undoubtedly felt at the outbreak of the war,” Miller argued, “was only an incidental, a purely passing sensation compared to the idle and greedy inertia which followed it.  The war lost,” he went on, “might have acted as a lash upon the torpor of many of these men.  Won, it created a wave of immorality and extravagance from which they had never recovered.  They spent more than they had and they earned more than they were worth.  That is to say, they lived an unnatural life.”

“It is fortunate, then,” Tallente remarked, “that the new generation is almost here.”

“They, too, carry the taint,” Miller insisted.  Tallente looked thoughtfully across towards his host.

“It seems to me that this is a little disheartening,” he said.  “It is exactly what one might have expected from Horlock or even Lethbridge.  Miller, who is nearer to the proletariat than any of us, would have us believe that the people who should be the bulwark of the State are not fit for their position.”

“I fancy,” Dartrey said soothingly, “that Miller was talking more as a philosopher than a practical man.”

“I speak according to my experience,” the latter insisted, a little doggedly.

“Amongst your own constituents?” Tallente asked, with a faint smile, reminiscent of a recent unexpected defeat of one of Miller’s partisans in a large constituency.

“Amongst them and others,” was the somewhat acid reply.  “Sands lost his seat at Tenchester through the apathy of the very class for whom we fight.”

“Tenchester is a wonderful place,” Nora intervened.  “I went down there lately to study certain phases of women’s labour.  Their factories are models and I found all the people with whom I came in contact exceptionally keen and well-informed.”