Then Phineas went out and walked across the park; but as he went he became quite aware that his back was broken.  It was not the less broken because he sang to himself little songs to prove to himself that it was whole and sound.  It was broken, and it seemed to him now that he never could become an Atlas again, to bear the weight of the world upon his shoulders.  What did anything signify?  All that he had done had been part of a game which he had been playing throughout, and now he had been beaten in his game.  He absolutely ignored his old passion for Lady Laura as though it had never been, and regarded himself as a model of constancy,—­as a man who had loved, not wisely perhaps, but much too well,—­and who must now therefore suffer a living death.  He hated Parliament.  He hated the Colonial Office.  He hated his friend Mr. Monk; and he especially hated Madame Max Goesler.  As to Lord Chiltern,—­he believed that Lord Chiltern had obtained his object by violence.  He would see to that!  Yes;—­let the consequences be what they might, he would see to that!

He went up by the Duke of York’s column, and as he passed the Athenaeum he saw his chief, Lord Cantrip, standing under the portico talking to a bishop.  He would have gone on unnoticed, had it been possible; but Lord Cantrip came down to him at once.  “I have put your name down here,” said his lordship.

“What’s the use?” said Phineas, who was profoundly indifferent at this moment to all the clubs in London.

“It can’t do any harm, you know.  You’ll come up in time.  And if you should get into the ministry, they’ll let you in at once.”

“Ministry!” ejaculated Phineas.  But Lord Cantrip took the tone of voice as simply suggestive of humility, and suspected nothing of that profound indifference to all ministers and ministerial honours which Phineas had intended to express.  “By-the-bye,” said Lord Cantrip, putting his arm through that of the Under-Secretary, “I wanted to speak to you about the guarantees.  We shall be in the devil’s own mess, you know—­” And so the Secretary of State went on about the Rocky Mountain Railroad, and Phineas strove hard to bear his burden with his broken back.  He was obliged to say something about the guarantees, and the railway, and the frozen harbour,—­and something especially about the difficulties which would be found, not in the measures themselves, but in the natural pugnacity of the Opposition.  In the fabrication of garments for the national wear, the great thing is to produce garments that shall, as far as possible, defy hole-picking.  It may be, and sometimes is, the case, that garments so fabricated will be good also for wear.  Lord Cantrip, at the present moment, was very anxious and very ingenious in the stopping of holes; and he thought that perhaps his Under-Secretary was too much prone to the indulgence of large philanthropical views without sufficient thought of the hole-pickers.  But on this occasion,