‘I am sure,’ observed the politician, ’everyone who has the good of the working classes at heart must feel indebted to you.  It’s so very seldom that men of culture care to address audiences of that kind.  Yet it must be the most effectual way of reaching the people.  You address them on English Literature, I think?’

Egremont did not care to explain that he had now a broader subject.  He murmured an affirmative.  Dalmaine had hoped to elicit some of the ‘Thoughts for the Present,’ and felt disappointment.

‘An excellent choice, it seems to me,’ he continued, making his glass revolve on the table-cloth.  ’They are much too ignorant of the best wealth of their country.  They have so few inducements to read the great historians, for instance.  If you can bring them to do so, you make them more capable citizens, abler to form a judgment on the questions of the day.’

Egremont smiled.

‘My one aim,’ he remarked, ’is to persuade them to forget that there are such things as questions of the day.’

Dalmaine also smiled, and with a slight involuntary curling of the lip.

’Ah, I remember our discussions on the Atlantic.  I scarcely thought you would apply those ideas in their—­their fulness, when you began practical work.  You surely will admit that, in a time when their interests are engaging so much attention, working men should—­for instance—­go to the polls with intelligent preparation.’

‘I’d rather they didn’t go to the polls at all,’ Walter replied.  He knew that this was exaggeration, but it pleased him to exaggerate.  He enjoyed the effect on the honourable member’s broad countenance.

‘Come, come!’ said Dalmaine, laughing with appearance of entering into the joke.  ’At that rate, English freedom would soon be at an end.  One might as well abolish newspapers.’

’In my opinion, the one greatest boon that could be granted the working class.  I do my best to dissuade them from the reading of newspapers.’

Dalmaine turned the whole matter into a jest.  Secretly he believed that Egremont was poking contemptuous fun at him, but it was his principle to receive everything with good-humour.  They drew apart again, each feeling more strongly than ever the instinctive opposition between their elements.  It amounted to a reciprocal dislike, an irritation provoked by each other’s presence.  Dalmaine was beginning to suspect Egremont of some scheme too deep for his fathoming; it was easier for him to believe anything, than that idealism pure and simple was at the bottom of such behaviour.  Walter, on the other hand, viewed the politician’s personality with something more than contempt.  Dalmaine embodied those forces of philistinism, that essence of the vulgar creed, which Egremont had undertaken to attack, and which, as he already felt, were likely to yield as little before his efforts as a stone wall under the blow of a naked hand.  Two such would do well to keep apart.