“Let us finish talking about you first,” he begged.  “You spoke quite frankly of a husband.  Tell me, have you made up your mind what manner of man he must be?”

“Not in the least.  I am content to leave that entirely to fate.”

“Bucolic?  Intellectual?  An artist?  A man of affairs?”

She made a little grimace.

“How can I tell?  I cannot conceive caring for an ordinary person, but then every woman feels like that.  And, you see, if I did care, he wouldn’t be ordinary—­to me.  And so far as I am concerned,” she insisted, with a shade of restlessness in her manner, “that finishes the subject.  You must please devote yourself to telling me at least some of the things I want to know.  What is the use of having one of the world’s successful men tete-a-tete, a prisoner to my hospitality, unless I can make him gratify my curiosity?”

The thought created by her words burned through his mind like a flash of destroying lightning.

“One of the world’s successful men,” he repeated.  “Is that how I seem to you?”

“And to the world,” she asserted.

He shook his head sadly.

“I have worked very hard,” he said.  “I have been very ambitious.  A few of my ambitions have been gratified, but the glory of them has passed with attainment.  Now I enter upon the last lap and I possess none of the things I started out in life to achieve.”

“But how absurd!” she exclaimed.  “You are one of our great politicians.  You would have to be reckoned with in any regrouping of parties.”

“Without even a seat in the House of Commons,” he reminded her bitterly.  “And again, how can a man be a great politician when there are no politics?  The confusion amongst the parties has become chaos, and I for one have not been clear-sighted enough to see my way through.”

“Of course, I know vaguely what you mean,” she said, “but remember that I am only a newspaper-educated politician.  Can’t you be a little more explicit?”

He lit another cigarette and smoked restlessly for a moment.

“I’ll try and explain, if I can,” he went on.  “To be a successful politician, from the standard which you or I would aim at, a man needs not only political insight, but he needs to be able to adopt his views to the practical programme of one of the existing parties, or else to be strong enough to form a party of his own.  That is where I have come to the cul-de-sac in my career.  It was my ambition to guide the working classes of the country into their rightful place in our social scheme, but I have also always been an intensely keen Imperialist, and therefore at daggers drawn with many of the so-called Labour leaders.  The consequence has been that for ten years I have been hanging on to the thin edge of nothing, a member of the Coalition Government, a member by sufferance of a hotchpotch party which was created by the combination of the Radicals and the