"But," objected his brother, "what's the use of my standing for a party that is pretty sure to be beaten?"
"You think that's the case?"
Eustace repeated Mr. Stark's opinions, and what he had heard from Quarrier. It seemed to cost William an effort to fix his mind on the question; but at length he admitted that the contest would probably be a very close one, even granting that the Conservatives secured a good candidate.
"That's as much as to say," observed his brother, "that the Liberals stand to win, as things are. Now, there seems to be no doubt that Liversedge would gladly withdraw in favour of a better man. What I want you to do is to set this thing in train for me. I am in earnest."
"You astonish me! I can't reconcile such an ambition with"——
"No, no; of course not." Glazzard spoke with unwonted animation. "You don't know what my life is and has been. Look I must do something to make my blood circulate, or I shall furnish a case for the coroner one of these mornings. I want excitement. I have taken up one thing after another, and gone just far enough to understand that there's no hope of reaching what I aimed at—superlative excellence; then the thing began to nauseate me. I'm like poor Jackson, the novelist, who groaned to me once that for fifteen years the reviewers had been describing his books as 'above the average.' In whatever I have undertaken the results were 'above the average,' and that's all. This is damned poor consolation for a man with a temperament like mine!"
His voice broke down. He had talked himself into a tremor, and the exhibition of feeling astonished his brother, who—as is so often the case between brothers—had never suspected what lay beneath the surface of Eustace's dilettante life.
"I can enter into that," said the elder, slowly. "But do you imagine that in politics you have found your real line?"
"No such thing. But it offers me a chance of living for a few years. I don't flatter myself that I could make a figure in the House of Commons; but I want to sit there, and be in the full current of existence. I had never dreamt of such a thing until Stark suggested it. But he's a shrewd fellow, and he has guessed my need."
"What about the financial matter?" asked William, after reflection.