"He's good," she said; "he's kindly.He's everything but magic.
He's the very image of the decent, sober, honourable life.You can't say a thing against him or I--except that something--something in his imagination, something in the tone of his voice--fails for me.Why don't I love him?--he's a better man than you! Why don't you? IS he a better man than you? He's usage, he's honour, he's the right thing, he's the breed and the tradition,--a gentleman.
You're your erring, incalculable self.I suppose we women will trust this sort and love your sort to the very end of time...."We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked.It seemed enormously unreasonable to us that two people who had come to the pitch of easy and confident affection and happiness that held between us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder half the substance of their lives.We felt ourselves crushed and beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in the service of jealousy."The mass of people don't feel these things in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said."Is it because they're different in grain, or educated out of some primitive instinct?""It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more than the gateway," I said."Lust and then jealousy; their simple conception--and we have gone past all that and wandered hand in hand...."I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of gull, whose wings are brownish-white, circle and hover against the blue.And then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear far out to sea, and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the rest should leave it so serene.
"And in this State of ours," I resumed.
"Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking out at the horizon."Let's talk no more of things we can never see.
Talk to me of the work you are doing and all we shall do--after we have parted.We've said too little of that.We've had our red life, and it's over.Thank Heaven!--though we stole it! Talk about your work, dear, and the things we'll go on doing--just as though we were still together.We'll still be together in a sense--through all these things we have in common."And so we talked of politics and our outlook.We were interested to the pitch of self-forgetfulness.We weighed persons and forces, discussed the probabilities of the next general election, the steady drift of public opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism towards us.It was very manifest that in spite of Wardenham and the EXPURGATOR, we should come into the new Government strongly.The party had no one else, all the young men were formally or informally with us; Esmeer would have office, Lord Tarvrille, I...and very probably there would be something for Shoesmith."And for my own part," I said, "I count on backing on the Liberal side.For the last two years we've been forcing competition in constructive legislation between the parties.The Liberals have not been long in following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead.They'll have to give votes and lip service anyhow.Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY, they say, are Liberals....
"I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley,"I said, "ever so many years ago.It was some place near Locarno, and we looked down the lake that shone weltering--just as now we look over the sea.And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless way of all that you and I are doing now.""I!" said Isabel, and laughed.
"Well, of some such thing," I said, and remained for awhile silent, thinking of Locarno.
I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal things that I had felt in my youth; statecraft became real and wonderful again with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic problems.I began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her, as I could never talk of them to any one but Isabel; began to recover again the purpose that lay under all my political ambitions and adjustments and anticipations.I saw the State, splendid and wide as I had seen it in that first travel of mine, but now it was no mere distant prospect of spires and pinnacles, but populous with fine-trained, bold-thinking, bold-doing people.It was as if I had forgotten for a long time and now remembered with amazement.
