Approaching, he perceived that it bore a crude drawing of a convict and “Good old Dartmoor” for legend.  White with anger, he stopped the car, leaped out on to the curb, and pushing his way through the crowd, entered the shop.  He seized one of the white-coated assistants by the arm.  “Show me the way to that first-floor room,” he cried fiercely.

The assistant, half-dragged, half-leading, and wholly astonished, took him through the shop and pointed to the staircase.  Paul sprang up and dashed through the door into the room, which appeared to be some business office.  Three or four young men, who turned grinning from the window, be thrust aside, and plucking the offending strip from the drawing-pins which secured it to the sill, he tore it across and across.

“You cads!  You brutes!” he shouted, trampling on the fragments.  “Can’t you fight like Englishmen?”

The young men, realizing the identity of the wrathful apparition, stared open-mouthed, turned red, and said nothing.  Paul strode out, looking very fierce, and drove off in his car amid the cheers of the crowd, to which he paid no notice.

“It makes me sick!” he cried passionately to Wilson, who was with him.  “I hope to God he wins in spite, of it!”

“What about the party?” asked Wilson.

Paul damned the party.  He was in the overwrought mood in which a man damns everything.  Quagmire and bramble and the derision of Olympus-that was the end of his vanity of an existence.  Suppose he was elected—­what then?  He would be a failure-the high gods in their mirth would see to that—­a puppet in Frank Ayres’ hands until the next general election, when be would have ignominiously to retire.  Awakener of England indeed!  He could not even awaken Hickney Heath.  As he dashed through the streets in his triumphal car, he hated Hickney Heath, hated the wild “hoorays” of waggon-loads of his supporters on their way to the polls, hated the smug smiles of his committee-men at polling stations.  He forgot that he did not hate England.  A little black disk an inch or two in diameter if cunningly focussed can obscure the sun in heaven from human eye.  There was England still behind the little black disk, though Paul for the moment saw it not.

Wilson pulled his scrubby moustache and made no retort to Paul’s anathema.  To him Paul was one of the fine flower of the Upper Classes to which lower middle-class England still, with considerable justification, believes to be imbued with incomprehensible and unalterable principles of conduct.  The grand old name of gentleman still has its magic in this country—­and is, by the way, not without its influence in one or two mighty republics wherein the equality of man is very loudly proclaimed.  Wilson, therefore, gladly suffered Paul’s lunatic Quixotry.  For himself he approved hugely of the cartoon.  If he could have had his way, Hickney Heath would have flamed with poster reproductions of it.  But he had a dim appreciation of, and a sneaking admiration for, the aristocrat’s point of view, and, being a practical man, evaded a discussion on the ethics of the situation.