XVI
HANDS ACROSS THE SEA
There is a Pride whose Father is Understanding, whose Mother is Humility, whose Business is the Recognition and Discharge of Duty. That is the true Pride.—Merrow's Essays of the Time.
I was impatient to reach London, but I should have been far more impatient if I had known that Constance Grey stood waiting to meet me on the arrival platform at Waterloo.
"They told me your train at the office," she said, as I took one of her hands in both of mine, "and I could not resist coming to give you the news. Don't say you have had it!"
"No," I told her. "My best news is that Constance has come to meet me, and that I am alive to appreciate the fact very keenly. Another trifling item is that, so far as I can tell, practically every member of The Citizens would respond to-morrow to a call for active service in Timbuctoo—if the call came. I tell you, Constance, this is not reform, it's revolution that has swept over England. We call our membership three and a half millions; it's fifty millions, really. They're all Citizens, every mother's son of them; and every daughter, too."
We were in a cab now.
"But what about my news?" said Constance.
"Yes, tell me, do. And isn't it magnificent about the Navy? How about those 'Terrible' fellows? Constance, do you realize how all this must strike a man who was scribbling and fiddling about disarmament a year ago? And do you realize who gave that man decent sanity?"
"Hush! It wasn't a person, it was a force; it was the revolution that brought the change."