“Give it to you unasked sometimes,” said Camelia.
Sir Arthur had told her all about that lost cause, and all about his plans for the future. There was a very delightful plan for the very near future; the next session would decide the fate of the Factory Bill that went by her lover’s name, and Camelia, under her attentive quietness, felt a heaving sigh of ambition gather. Sir Arthur’s grave eagerness showed that after his winning of herself, his political campaign filled the chief place in his hopes and thoughts. Her interest delighted him, and the intelligence of her comments.
He had himself an almost reverent belief in the bill, and Camelia’s sympathetic affirmatives seemed to chime deliciously with his own deep, active pity for the dim, toiling masses the bill was to reach and succor. Such a common object was a sanctification; he could hardly, he felt, have loved a woman who did not feel his own deep pity. They talked now of the coming struggle, of the rather dubious success of the second reading that might yet be enhanced for the third.
“And do you know,” he said, “Perior, positively Perior, approves; he is buckling on his armor for the final fray. An individuality like that counts, you know. A few leaders in the Friday would rally many waverers.”
Camelia flushed suddenly when he said this; it delighted her sense of proprietorship in Perior to hear his praise—to hear that for others, too, he counted. And yet a touch of pain came with the delight, reminding her that under present conditions the delight was very generous, and proprietorship very unassured.
How he evaded it! Yes, he certainly was horrid; but her breath came quickly, and with a deft persistence she kept Sir Arthur still talking of him, finding in his answers to her questions on his youth glimpses of Perior’s.
“Always generous, always intolerant, always tripping into ditches while star-gazing,” said Sir Arthur; “he has an exaggerated strain in him; it must be that Irish ancestress. He feels everything more acutely than thicker-skinned mortals, sees everything, the good and the bad, magnified—a trifle grotesquely. But it is a noble nature;” and he went on, as they walked back and forth over the lawn, Perior’s pianoforte exposition, firmly insistent, coming to their ears at broken intervals: “Perior is staunch on individualism, as you know; believes in the hygienic value to the race of the combat—a savage creed, I tell him; but he has amended it; he is not one jot afraid of seeming inconsistent; he owns to the scientific logic of our attitude. I was afraid he would accuse us of socialistic methods, tyrannical kindness, State intervention,” and so from Perior Sir Arthur went back to the all-absorbing topic of the bill; he could allow the bill to absorb him. For all Camelia’s evasions and smiling warnings to patience, he was deliciously sure of the ultimate end of all. He could afford to be patient with the luminous sympathy of her eyes upon him, afford to talk of the unfortunate women-workers whose long hours the kind tyranny of the bill would restrict, while this woman listened with such a sweet chiming of pity.
“If you could only count on a fair following among the Liberals,” Camelia said, phrasing his keenest anxiety, “horrid egotists! They all have factories, I suppose. Mr. Rodrigg may wrest your dubious majority from you; he is the lion in your path, isn’t he? and he has a whole town of factories. What chance has a moral conviction against a town of factories? And he is such a bull-dog; I did wrong to dignify him by the leonine simile.”
“Such a clever chap, too,” said Sir Arthur; “bull-dog cleverness, I mean.”
“And bull-dogs are so dear,” Camelia said, as a small brindled member of the race, his head haloed by a ferociously bristling collar, came bounding to them over the lawn. “Dear, precious beastie,” she put her hand on the dog’s head as he stood on his hind-legs to greet her, “we must indeed find another epithet for Mr. Rodrigg, not that I dislike him, you know. He shares some of your opinions,” she added rather roguishly.