'Oh, that fellow! Well, he's not my novelist, but it's the keenest intelligence we have applied to fiction.'
'He is my novelist. So I've a right to be sorry he knows nothing about women. See here! Even in his most rationalized vision of the New Time, he can't help betraying his old-fashioned prejudice in favour of the "dolly" view of women. His hero says, "I prayed that night, let me confess it, to an image I had set up in my heart, an image that still serves with me as a symbol for things inconceivable, to a Master Artificer, the unseen captain of all who go about the building of the world, the making of mankind——"' Vida's finger skipped, lifting to fall on the heroine's name. '"Nettie... She never came into the temple of that worshipping with me."' Swiftly she turned the pages back. 'Where's that other place? Here! The man says to the heroine—to his ideal woman he says, "Behind you and above you rises the coming City of the World, and I am in that building. Dear heart! you are only happiness!" That's the whole view of man in a nutshell. Even the highest type of woman such an imagination as this can conjure up——' She shook her head. '"You are only happiness, dear"—a minister of pleasure, negligible in all the nobler moods, all the times of wider vision or exalted effort! Tell me'—she bent her head and looked into her companion's face with a new passion dawning in her eyes—'in the building of that City of the Future, in the making of it beautiful, shall women really have no share?'
'My dear, I only know that I shall have no share myself.'
'Ah, we don't speak of ourselves.' She opened the hansom doors and her companion got out. 'But this Comet man,' she said as she followed, 'he might have a share if only he knew why all the great visions have never yet been more than dreams. That this man should think foundations can be well and truly laid when the best of one half the race are "only happiness, dear!"' She turned on the threshold. 'Whose happiness?'
CHAPTER XIV
The fall of the Liberal Ministry was said by the simple-minded to have come as a bolt from the blue. Certainly into the subsequent General Election were entering elements but little foreseen.
Nevertheless, the last two bye-elections before the crash had resulted in the defeat of the Liberal candidate not by the Tory antagonist, but in one case by the nominee of the Labour party, in the other by an independent Socialist. Both these men had publicly thanked the Suffragettes for their notable share in piling up those triumphant and highly significant majorities. Now the country was facing an election where, for the first time in the history of any great nation, women were playing a part that even their political enemies could hardly with easy minds call subordinate.
Only faint echoes of the din penetrated the spacious quiet of Ulland House. Although the frequent week-end party was there, the great hall on this particular morning presented a deserted appearance as the tall clock by the staircase chimed the hour of noon. The insistence of the ancient timepiece seemed to have set up a rival in destruction of the Sunday peace, for no sooner had the twelfth stroke died than a bell began to ring. The little door in the wainscot beyond the clock was opened. An elderly butler put his head round the huge screen of Spanish leather that masked the very existence of the modest means of communication with the quarters of the Ulland domestics. So little was a ring at the front door expected at this hour that Sutton was still slowly getting into the left sleeve of his coat when his mistress appeared from the garden by way of the French window. The old butler withdrew a discreet instant behind the screen to put the last touches to his toilet, but Lady John had seen that he was there.