Exchange, you would have got in."

He looked at her in some surprise.

"That is exactly what I thought myself," he agreed. "How on earth do
you come to know all these things?"

"I take an interest in your career," she said, smiling at him, "and I
hate to see you so dejected without cause."

He felt a little thrill at her words. A queer new sense of
companionship stirred in his pulses. The bitterness of his suppressed
disappointment was suddenly soothed. There was something of the
excitement of the discoverer, too, in these new sensations. It seemed
to him that he was finding something which had been choked out of his
life and which was yet a real and natural part of it.

"You will make an awful nuisance of me if you don't mind," he warned
her. "If you encourage me like this, you will develop the most juvenile
of all failings--you will make me want to talk about myself. I am
beginning to feel terribly egotistical already."

She leaned a little towards him. Her mouth was soft with sweet and
feminine tenderness, her eyes warm with kindness.

"That is just what I hoped I might succeed in doing," she declared. "I
have been interested in your career ever since I had the faintest idea
of what politics meant. You could not give me a greater happiness than
to talk to me--about yourself."