"Oh! if you look at what things are!"
"First of all, the messing about to get into the House. These confounded parties mean nothing—absolutely nothing. They aren't even decent factions. You blither to damned committees of damned tradesmen whose sole idea for this world is to get overpaid for their self-respect; you whisper and hobnob with local solicitors and get yourself seen about with them; you ass about the charities and institutions, and lunch and chatter and chum with every conceivable form of human conceit and pushfulness and trickery———"
He broke off. "It isn't as if they were up to anything! They're working in their way, just as you are working in your way. It's the same game with all of them. They chase a phantom gratification, they toil and quarrel and envy, night and day, in the perpetual attempt to persuade themselves in spite of everything that they are real and a success———"
He stopped and smoked.
Melville was spiteful. "Yes," he admitted, "but I thought your little movement was to be something more than party politics and self-advancement———?"
He left his sentence interrogatively incomplete.
"The condition of the poor," he said.
"Well?" said Chatteris, regarding him with a sort of stony admission in his blue eyes.
Melville dodged the look. "At Sandgate," he said, "there was, you know, a certain atmosphere of belief———"
"I know," said Chatteris for the second time.
415
