Ought there not to be a school for reformers, a training college where could be inculcated self-examination, patience, temperance, subordination to duty; with lectures on the fundamental laws, within which all progress must be accomplished, outside which lay confusion and explosions; with lectures on history, showing how improvements had been brought about and how failure had been invited, thus avoiding much waste of reforming zeal; with lectures on the properties and tendencies of human nature, forbidding the attempt to treat it as a sum in rule of three?

There were the others.  The men and women not in the lime-light.  The lone, scattered men and women who saw no flag but Pity’s ragged skirt; who heard no drum but the world’s low cry of pain; who fought with feeble hands against the wrong around them; who with aching heart and troubled eyes laboured to make kinder the little space about them.  The great army of the nameless reformers uncheered, unparagraphed, unhonoured.  The unknown sowers of the seed.  Would the reapers of the harvest remember them?

Beyond giving up her visits to the house, she had made no attempt to avoid meeting Phillips; and at public functions and at mutual friends they sometimes found themselves near to one another.  It surprised her that she could see him, talk to him, and even be alone with him without its troubling her.  He seemed to belong to a part of her that lay dead and buried—­something belonging to her that she had thrust away with her own hands:  that she knew would never come back to her.

She was still interested in his work and keen to help him.  It was going to be a stiff fight.  He himself, in spite of Carleton’s opposition, had been returned with an increased majority; but the Party as a whole had suffered loss, especially in the counties.  The struggle centred round the agricultural labourer.  If he could be won over the Government would go ahead with Phillips’s scheme.  Otherwise there was danger of its being shelved.  The difficulty was the old problem of how to get at the men of the scattered villages, the lonely cottages.  The only papers that they ever saw were those, chiefly of the Carleton group, that the farmers and the gentry took care should come within their reach; that were handed to them at the end of their day’s work as a kindly gift; given to the school children to take home with them; supplied in ample numbers to all the little inns and public-houses.  In all these, Phillips was held up as their arch enemy, his proposal explained as a device to lower their wages, decrease their chances of employment, and rob them of the produce of their gardens and allotments.  No arguments were used.  A daily stream of abuse, misrepresentation and deliberate lies, set forth under flaming headlines, served their simple purpose.  The one weekly paper that had got itself established among them, that their fathers had always taken, that dimly they had come to look upon as their one friend, Carleton had at last succeeded in purchasing.  When that, too, pictured Phillips’s plan as a diabolical intent to take from them even the little that they had, and give it to the loafing socialist and the bloated foreigner, no room for doubt was left to them.