But Eloquent felt that this was just what he was not. He felt very muzzled indeed. All sorts of vague thoughts went surging through his brain that could find no expression in words.
"I do believe," he said desperately, "if she was to give the whisperingest little call, I'd be obliged to go . . . and so would you," he continued, shaking his head at Mr Gladstone, "you'd do just the same."
He felt that, in some inexplicable, subtly mysterious fashion, there was a kind of affinity between Mr Gladstone and Mrs Ffolliot.
Mr Gladstone would understand, and not be too hard upon him.
In the years that followed, he saw Mrs Ffolliot from time to time from the window or in the street, but never again did he come so close to her as to touch her.
Never did he see her, however, without that strange thrill of enthusiastic admiration; that dumb, inarticulate sense of having seen something entirely satisfying and delightful; satisfying for the moment only: he paid dearly for his brief joy in after hours of curious depression and an aching sense of emptiness and loss. She was so far away.
Sometimes she was driving with her husband, and little Eloquent wondered after they had passed what manner of man it could be who had the right to sit by her whenever he liked. He never had time to notice Mr Ffolliot, till one day he saw him in the carriage alone, and scrutinised him sternly. Long afterwards he read how some admirer of Lord Hartington had said that what he liked most about him was his "You-be-damnedness." The phrase, Eloquent felt, exactly described Mr Ffolliot; aloof, detached, a fastidious, fine gentleman to his finger tips, entirely careless as to what the common people thought of him; not willingly conscious, unless rudely reminded of their existence, that there were any common people: such, Eloquent felt sure, was Mr Ffolliot's mental attitude, and he hated him.
Mr Ffolliot wore a monocle, and just at that time a new figure loomed large on the little boy's political horizon—a figure held up before him not for admiration, but reprobation—as a turncoat, an apostate, a real and menacing danger to the Cause dada had most at heart; the well-known effigy of Mr Joseph Chamberlain. He always appeared with monocle and orchid. In his expression, judged by the illustrated papers, there was something of that same "you-be-damnedness" he disliked so much in Mr Ffolliot. Eloquent lumped them together in his mind, and hated Mr Ffolliot as ardently as he worshipped his wife; and to no one at all did he ever say a word about either of them.
He rose rapidly in the school, and when he was nine years old had reached a form with boys much older than himself, boys old enough to write essays; and Eloquent wrote essays too; essays which were cruder and quainter than those of his companions. One day the subject given—rather an abstruse theme for boys to tackle—was Beauty. Eloquent wrote as follows:
"Beauty is tall and has a pleasant sounding voice, and you want to come as near as you can. You want to look at her all the time because you don't see it often. Beauty is most pretty to look at and you don't seem to see anyone else when it's there. She smells nice, a wafty smell like tobacco plants not pipes in the evening. When beauty looks at you you feel glad and funny and she smiles at you and looks with her eyes. She is different to aunts and people's wives. Taller and quite a different shape. Beauty is different.—E. A. Gallup, class IIIb."