private affairs
was necessarily a formidable thing. He himself was proceeding very cautiously,
and preferred not even to know too much just at present, lest a certain personal
antipathy he was conscious of toward Jermyn, and an occasional liability to
exasperation, should get the better of a calm and clear-sighted resolve not to
quarrel with the man while he could be of use. Harold would have been disgusted
with himself if he had helped to frustrate his own purpose. And his strongest
purpose now was to get returned for parliament, to make a figure there as a
Liberal member, and to become on all grounds a personage of weight in North
Loamshire.
    How Harold Transome came to be a Liberal in opposition to all the traditions
of his family, was a more subtle inquiry than he had ever cared to follow out.
The newspapers undertook to explain it. The North Loamshire Herald witnessed
with a grief and disgust certain to be shared by all persons who were actuated
by wholesome British feeling, an example of defection in the inheritor of a
family name which in times past had been associated with attachment to right
principle, and with the maintenance of our constitution in Church and State; and
pointed to it as an additional proof that men who had passed any large portion
of their lives beyond the limits of our favoured country, usually contracted not
only a laxity of feeling towards Protestantism, nay, towards religion itself - a
latitudinarian spirit hardly distinguishable from atheism - but also a levity of
disposition, inducing them to tamper with those institutions by which alone
Great Britain had risen to her pre-eminence among the nations. Such men,
infected with outlandish habits, intoxicated with vanity, grasping at momentary
power by flattery of the multitude, fearless because godless, liberal because
un-English, were ready to pull one stone from under another in the national
edifice, till the great structure tottered to its fall. On the other hand, the
Duffield Watchman saw in this signal instance of self-liberation from the
trammels of prejudice, a decisive guarantee of intellectual pre-eminence, united
with a generous sensibility to the claims of man as man, which had burst
asunder, and cast off, by a spontaneous exertion of energy, the cramping
out-worn shell of hereditary bias and class interest.
    But these large-minded guides of public opinion argued from wider data than
could be furnished by any knowledge of the particular case concerned. Harold
Transome was neither the dissolute cosmopolitan so vigorously sketched by the
Tory Herald, nor the intellectual giant and moral lobster suggested by the
liberal imagination of the Watchman. Twenty years ago he had been a bright