"Don't agree with me? Why?"
"I don't believe in these party labels. You are a party man, a Labour man. I have the deepest sympathy with the toilers of the world. I have been working for them for fifty years. Perhaps, too, the Labour Party is the outcome of the injustice of the past. But all such parties have a tendency to put class against class, to see things in a one-sided way, to foster bitterness and strife. Take my advice and give up being a politician."
"Give up being a politician! I don't understand."
"A politician in the ordinary sense is a party man; too often a party hack, a party voting machine. Be more than a politician, be a statesman. All classes of society are interdependent. We can none of us do without the other. Capital and labour, the employer and the employee, all depend on each other. All men should be brothers and work for the common interest. Don't seek to represent a class, or to legislate for a class, Faversham. Work for all the classes, work for the community as a whole. And remember that Utopia is not created in a day. Good-night. Come and see us again soon."
Hugh Stanmore turned back, and left Dick alone. The young man felt strangely depressed, strangely lonely. He pictured Hugh Stanmore going back to the brightness and refinement of his little house, to be met with the bright smiles and loving words of his grandchild, while he plodded his way through the darkness. He thought, too, of Sir George Weston, who, even then, was with Beatrice Stanmore. Perhaps, most likely too, he was telling her that he loved her.
He stopped suddenly in the road, his brain on fire, his heart beating madly. A thousand wild fancies flashed through his brain, a thousand undefinable hopes filled his heart.
"No, it's impossible, blankly impossible!" he cried at length. "A will-o'-the-wisp, the dream of a madman—a madman! Why, even now she may be in his arms!"
The thought was agony to him. Even yet he did not know the whole secret of his heart, but he knew that he hated Sir George Weston, that he wished he had urged upon old Hugh Stanmore the utter unfitness of the great soldier as a husband for his grandchild.
But how could he? What right had he? Besides, according to all common-sense standards nothing could be more suitable. She was his equal in social status, and every way fitted to be his wife, while he would be regarded as the most eligible suitor possible.
"A voting machine at four hundred a year!"