"You mustn't turn my head!" she protested. "You, fresh from London,
which they tell me is terribly gay just now! I want to understand just
what it means, your throwing in your lot with the Democrats. My uncle
says, for instance, that you have abandoned respectable politics to
become a Tower Hill pedagogue."

"Respectable politics," he replied, "if by that you mean the present
government of the country, have been in the wrong hands for so long that
people scarcely realise what is undoubtedly the fact--that the country
isn't being governed at all. A Government with an Opposition Party
almost as powerful as itself, all made up of separate parties which are
continually demanding sops, can scarcely progress very far, can it?"

"But the Democrats," she ventured, "are surely only one of these
isolated parties?"

"I have formed a different idea of their strength," he answered. "I
believe that if a general election took place to-morrow, the Democrats
would sweep the country. I believe that we should have the largest
working majority any Government has had since the war."

"How terrible!" she murmured, involuntarily truthful.

"Your tame socialism isn't equal to the prospect," he remarked, a little
bitterly.

"My tame socialism, as you call it," she replied, "draws the line at
seeing the country governed by one class of person only, and that class
the one who has the least at stake in it."