‘You’ll soon forget it, Mr. Ackroyd,’ Lydia said, in a clear, steady voice.

’Well, you ’ll see if I do.  I’m one of the unlucky fellows that can never show what they feel.  It all comes out in the wrong way.  It doesn’t matter much now.’

Lydia had a feeling that this was not wholly sincere.  He seemed to take a pleasure in representing himself as luckless.  Combined with what she had heard, it helped her to say: 

’A man doesn’t suffer much from these things.  You’ll soon be cheerful again.  Good-bye, Mr. Ackroyd.’

She did not wait for anything more from him.

CHAPTER XI

A MAN WITH A FUTURE

Mr. Dalmaine first turned his attention to politics at the time when the question of popular education was to the front in British politics.  It was an excellent opportunity for would-be legislators conscious of rhetorical gifts and only waiting for some safe, simple subject whereon to exercise them.  Both safe and simple was the topic which all and sundry were then called upon to discuss; it was impossible not to have views on education (have we not all been educated?), and delightfully easy to support them by prophecy.  Never had the vaticinating style of oratory a greater vogue.  Never was a richer occasion for the utterance of wisdom such as recommends itself to the British public.

Mr. Dalmaine understood the tastes and habits of that public as well as most men of his standing.  After one abortive attempt to enter Parliament, he gained his seat for Vauxhall at the election of 1874, and from the day of his success he steadily applied himself to the political profession.  He was then two-and-thirty; for twelve years he had been actively engaged in commerce and now held the position of senior partner in a firm owning several factories in Lambeth.  Such a training was valuable; politics he viewed as business on a larger scale, and business, the larger its scale the better, was his one enthusiasm.  His education had not been liberal; he saw that that made no difference, and wisely pursued the bent of his positive mind where another man might have wasted his time in the attempt to gain culture.  He saw that his was the age of the practical.  Let who would be an idealist, the practical man in the end got all that was worth having.

He worked.  You might have seen him, for instance, in his study one Sunday morning in the January which the story has now reached; a glance at him showed that he was no idler in fields of art or erudition; blue-books were heaped about him, hooks bound in law calf lay open near his hand, newspapers monopolised one table.  He was interested in all that concerns the industrial population of Great Britain; he was making that subject his speciality; he meant to link his name with factory Acts, with education Acts, with Acts for the better housing of the work-folk, with what not of the kind.  And the single working man for whom he veritably cared one jot was Mr. James Dalmaine.