"Never heard of him?… Why, Farrell's our candidate over there! … Your candidate; because, if elected, he'll represent you; because your College and—if you choose to narrow it down—your own laboratories and lecture-rooms—will belong to his constituency. The rates on your buildings, the trams that bring your poorer students, the public money that pays their scholarships—"
"My dear Roddy," he broke in. "You know that I never could get up an interest in politics. As for local politics—"
That fired me up at once. "Pretty silly sneer, that! Doesn't there lurk, somewhere down in your consciousness, some sense of belonging to the first city in the world?… Oh, yes, you use it, fast enough, whenever you go back to Cambridge and play the condescending metropolitan in Combination Room. There, seventy minutes from Liverpool Street, you pose—yes, pose, Jack—as the urbane man, Horatius Flaccus life-size; whereas your job as a citizen is confined to cursing the rates, swearing if a pit in the wood pavement jolts you on the way home from the theatre, supposing it's somebody's business, supposing there's graft in it, and talking superciliously of Glasgow and Birmingham, provincial towns, while you can't help to cheapen the price of a cabbage in Covent Garden!"
"Dear Roddy," Foe answered—very tolerantly, I'll admit—"you'll get elected, to a dead certainty."
"Oh, I'm all right," said I, cooling down. "Wish I could be so sure of your man Farrell, across the bridge."
"Farrell?"
"That's his name.… Think you'll be able to remember it?"
Here Jimmy dropped the ash of his cigar into his coffee-cup and chipped in judiciously.
"Otty has the right of it, Professor—though we shall have to cure him of his platform style. Somebody has to look after this country and look after London; and if you despise the fellows who run the show, then it's up to you, my intellectuals, to come in and do the business better. But you won't. It bores you. 'Oh, go away—can't you see I'm busy? I've got a malignant growth here, potted in a glass bottle with a diet of sterilised fat and an occasional whisky and soda, and we're sitting around until the joker develops D.T. He's an empyema, from South America, fully-grown male—'"
"Heavens alive!"