«
    »Very good. I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting - not
persecuting, you know.«
    »There you go! That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for the
hustings. Now, do not let them lure you to the hustings, my dear Mr. Brooke. A
man always makes a fool of himself, speechifying: there's no excuse but being on
the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on your humming and hawing. You
will lose yourself, I forewarn you. You will make a Saturday pie of all parties'
opinions, and be pelted by everybody.«
    »That is what I expect, you know,« said Mr. Brooke, not wishing to betray
how little he enjoyed this prophetic sketch - »what I expect as an independent
man. As to the Whigs, a man who goes with the thinkers is not likely to be
hooked on by any party. He may go with them up to a certain point - up to a
certain point, you know. But that is what you ladies never understand.«
    »Where your certain point is? No. I should like to be told how a man can
have any certain point when he belongs to no party - leading a roving life, and
never letting his friends know his address. Nobody knows where Brooke will be -
there's no counting on Brooke - that is what people say of you, to be quite
frank. Now, do turn respectable. How will you like going to Sessions with
everybody looking shy on you, and you with a bad conscience and an empty
pocket?«
    »I don't pretend to argue with a lady on politics,« said Mr. Brooke, with an
air of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly conscious that this
attack of Mrs. Cadwallader's had opened the defensive campaign to which certain
rash steps had exposed him. »Your sex are not thinkers, you know - varium et
mutabile semper - that kind of thing. You don't know Virgil. I knew« - Mr.
Brooke reflected in time that he had not had the personal acquaintance of the
Augustan poet - »I was going to say, poor Stoddart, you know. That was what he
said. You ladies are always against an independent attitude - a man's caring for
nothing but truth, and that sort of thing. And there is no part of the county
where opinion is narrower than it is here - I don't mean to throw stones, you
know, but somebody is