“I’m not sure. It seems to me that the popular Members don’t do anything. They’re too busy being popular . . . too busy being agreeable to a herd of tireless parasites.”
“Which is quite out of your line, is it not?”
“Well, why should I snivel and crawl?” he defended. “One respects a man or one doesn’t. Popularity is, after all, only an expression of mob psychology; as you know, it is unstable—having either the vaguest of excuses, or palpable insincerity behind it.”
“You mean the insincerity of the person who is popular?”
“Of course! What man feels genuine friendliness towards enough people to make him ‘popular’?”
Azalea shook her head in the characteristic way that implied her resentment against accepting the inevitable.
“But don’t you feel that a certain amount of studied affability is—let us say—necessary to the attainment of success in public affairs?”
“No! I believe with Lincoln that the conduct of a statesman—and that is my high ambition, if it be God’s will that I attain to it—should be moulded upon three principles; ‘malice towards none, charity for all, firmness on the right’. These principles are not compatible with the flatteries and lightly-regarded mendacities of a popular idol. A statesman ought to be less of a man and more of an ethical inspiration. It’s not an easy ideal to live up to,” he concluded, “but at least it’s a clean one, and I think the only one that history justifies.”
“Yes,” repeated Azalea, as though careful that her voice should not betray her true opinion, “it’s a very clean one.”
Recalling that conversation, Dilling found himself musing rather pleasantly about Azalea. What a curious little creature she was! What a stimulating companion! He could not, for the life of him, visualise her features, but he could bring to mind many an illuminating twist of her thoughts. Times without number, he realised, he had invoked her extraordinary intuitive powers and transmuted them in the crucible of his logic, into what Sullivan was pleased to designate as invincibility in debate.