‘There’s nothing like a metaphor for an evasion,’ said Nevil, blinking over it.

She drew him another analogy, longer than was at all necessary; so tedious that her father struck through it with the remark: 

‘Concerning that quack—­that’s one in the background, though!’

‘I know of none,’ said Beauchamp, well-advised enough to forbear mention of the name of Shrapnel.

Cecilia petitioned that her stumbling ignorance, which sought the road of wisdom, might be heard out.  She had a reserve entanglement for her argumentative friend.  ’You were saying, Nevil, that you were for principles rather than for individuals, and you instanced Mr. Cougham, the senior Liberal candidate of Bevisham, as one whom you would prefer to see in Parliament instead of Seymour Austin, though you confess to Mr. Austin’s far superior merits as a politician and servant of his country:  but Mr. Cougham supports Liberalism while Mr. Austin is a Tory.  You are for the principle.’

‘I am,’ said he, bowing.

She asked:  ‘Is not that equivalent to the doctrine of election by Grace?’

Beauchamp interjected:  ‘Grace! election?’

Cecilia was tender to his inability to follow her allusion.

‘Thou art a Liberal—­then rise to membership,’ she said.  ’Accept my creed, and thou art of the chosen.  Yes, Nevil, you cannot escape from it.  Papa, he preaches Calvinism in politics.’

‘We stick to men, and good men,’ the colonel flourished.  ’Old English for me!’

‘You might as well say, old timber vessels, when Iron’s afloat, colonel.’

‘I suspect you have the worst of it there, papa,’ said Cecilia, taken by the unexpectedness and smartness of the comparison coming from wits that she had been undervaluing.

‘I shall not own I’m worsted until I surrender my vote,’ the colonel rejoined.

‘I won’t despair of it,’ said Beauchamp.

Colonel Halkett bade him come for it as often as he liked.  You’ll be beaten in Bevisham, I warn you.  Tory reckonings are safest:  it’s an admitted fact:  and we know you can’t win.  According to my judgement a man owes a duty to his class.’

’A man owes a duty to his class as long as he sees his class doing its duty to the country,’ said Beauchamp; and he added, rather prettily in contrast with the sententious commencement, Cecilia thought, that the apathy of his class was proved when such as he deemed it an obligation on them to come forward and do what little they could.  The deduction of the proof was not clearly consequent, but a meaning was expressed; and in that form it brought him nearer to her abstract idea of Nevil Beauchamp than when he raged and was precise.

After his departure she talked of him with her father, to be charitably satirical over him, it seemed.