Miller drank creme de menthe and smoked homemade Virginia cigarettes.  Tallente watched him and sighed.  Then, suddenly conscious of his host’s critical scrutiny, he felt an impulse of shame, felt that his contempt for the man had in it something almost snobbish.  He leaned forward and did his best.  Miller had been a school-board teacher, an exhibitioner at college, and was possessed of a singular though limited intelligence.  He could deal adequately with any one problem presented by itself and affected only by local conditions, yet the more Tallente talked with him, the more he realised his lack of breadth, his curious weakness of judgment when called upon to consider questions dependent upon varying considerations.  As to the right or wrong wording of a clause in the Factory Amendment Act, he could be lucid, explanatory and convincing; as to the justice of the same clause when compared with other forms of legislation, he was vague and unconvincing, didactic and prejudiced.  If Dartrey’s object had been to bring these two men into closer understanding of each other, he was certainly succeeding.  It is doubtful, however, whether the understanding progressed entirely in the fashion he had desired.  Nora, curled up in an easy-chair, affecting to be sleepy, but still listening earnestly, felt at last that intervention was necessary.  The self-revelation of Miller under Tallente’s surgical questioning was beginning to disturb even their host.

“I am being neglected,” she complained.  “If no one talks to me, I shall go home.”

Tallente rose at once and sat on the lounge by her side.  Dartrey stood on the hearth rug and plunged into an ingenious effort to reconcile various points of difference which had arisen between his two guests.  Tallente all the time was politely acquiescent, Miller a little sullen.  Like all men with brains acute enough to deal logically with a procession of single problems, he resented because he failed altogether to understand that a wider field of circumstances could possibly alter human vision.

Tallente walked home with Nora.  They chose the longer way, by the Embankment.

“This is the Cockney’s antithesis to the moonlight and hills of you country folk,” Nora observed, as she pointed to the yellow lights gashing across the black water.

Tallente drew a long breath of content.

“It’s good to be here, anyway.  I am glad to be out of that house,” he confessed.

“I’m afraid,” she sighed, “that our dear host’s party was a failure.  You and Miller were born in different camps of life.  It doesn’t seem to me that anything will ever bring you together.”

“For this reason,” Tallente explained eagerly.  “Miller’s outlook is narrow and egotistical.  He may be a shrewd politician, but there isn’t a grain of statesmanship in him.  He might make an excellent chairman of a parish council.  As a Cabinet Minister he would be impossible.”

“He will demand office, I am afraid,” Nora remarked.