Ironsyde—­and ten times deeper.  In fact, the nation’s very ill served by most that go there.  They are the showy, rich, noisy sort, who want to bulk in the public eye without working for it—­ciphers who do what they’re told, and don’t understand the inner nature of what they’re doing more than a hoss in a plough.  But men like Job, though not so noisy, would get to the root, and use their own judgment, and rise superior to party politics and the pitiful need to shout with your side, right or wrong.”

“Miss Waldron is very wishful for him to get in, and she says he’s got good ideas,” replied Nicholas.

“If so, he has to thank her for them,” added Sarah.

“And I hope,” continued Nicholas, “that if he does get in, he’ll be suffered to make a speech, and his words will fall stone dead on the ears of the members, and his schemes will fail.  Then he’ll know what it is to be flouted and to see his best feats win not a friendly sign.”

“Electors are a lot too easy going in my opinion,” said Nelly.  “I’m old enough to have seen their foolish ways in my time, and find, over and over again, that they are mostly gulls to be took with words.  They never ask what a man’s record is and turn over the pages of his past.  They never trouble about what he’s done, or how he’s made his money, or where he stands in public report.  It isn’t what he has done, but what he’s going to do.  Yet you can better judge of a man from his past than his promises, and measure, in the light of his record, whether he’s going to the House of Commons for patriotic, decent reasons, or for mean ones.  And never you vote for a lawyer, Nicholas Roberts.  ’Tis a golden rule with Job that never, under any manner of circumstances, will he help to get a lawyer into Parliament.  They stand in the way of all progress but their own; they suck our blood in every affair of life; they baffle all honest thinking with their cunning, and look at right and wrong only from the point of expediency.  Job says there ought to be a law against lawyers going in at all.  But catch them making it!  In fact, we’re in their clutches more than the fly in the web, because they make the laws; and they’ll never make any laws to limit their own powers over us, though always quick enough to increase them.  Job says that the only bright side to a revolution would be that the law and the lawyers would be swept into the street orderly bin together.  Then we’d start clean and free, and try to keep clean and free.”

Upon this subject Mrs. Legg always found plenty to say.  Indeed she continued to open her mind till they grew weary.

“We must be moving if we’re going to church,” said Sarah.  “I think we’d better go and pick up a bit of charity to our neighbour—­Sunday and all.”

CHAPTER XVI

THE OFFER OF MARRIAGE