Peter Dale's face darkened. This was what they had feared.
"You mean that you're breaking away from us?" he exclaimed angrily. "There's no room in our little party for Independent Members, no sort of sense in a mere handful of us all pulling different ways."
"I never joined your party, Mr. Dale," Maraton reminded him. "I have never joined any man's party. I am for the people."
"And what about us?" Graveling demanded. "Aren't we for the people?
Isn't that what we're in Parliament for? Isn't that why we are called
Labour Members?"
Maraton regarded the last speaker steadily.
"Mr. Graveling," he said, "since you have mooted the question, I will admit that I do not consider you, as a body of men, entirely devoted to the cause of the people. You are each devoted to your own constituency. It is your business to look after the few thousand voters who sent you into Parliament, and in your eagerness to serve and please them, I think that you sometimes forget the greater, the more universal truths. I may be wrong. That is how the matter seems to me."
"Then since you're so frank," Peter Dale declared, with undiminished wrath, "I'll just imitate your candour! I'll tell you how you seem to us. You seem like a man with a gift, whose head has been turned by Mr. Foley and his fine friends. You're full of great phrases, but there's nothing practical about them or you. You're on your way to an easy place for yourself in the world, and a seat in Foley's Cabinet."
"Have you any objection," Maraton asked, "to the people's cause being represented in the Cabinet?"
It was the last straw, this! Peter Dale's voice shook with passion.
"It's been a promise," he shouted, "for this many a year! A sop to the people it was, at the last election. There's one of us ought to be in the Cabinet—one of us, I say, not a carpetbagger!"