'Oh yes!' she exclaimed with cold disdain.
'Do you hate them, too?'
'I pity them.'
He felt no impulse to retort, but an expression of pain came over his face.
'Well, look at them all; look at them, Honourable! Look at the haggard, worn faces, yellow with bile, green with envy! Look at the fat, flaccid faces, pale and unhealthy! How worn out before their time are some of those men, and what nervousness in the gestures of others! They all seem afflicted with the same disease—a fatal malady which eats them up or swells them out. I imagine that gamblers in the gambling dens must be like them.'
'At least, politics are a great passion,' he timidly suggested.
'Great? Perhaps. So people say, but I do not believe it. When politics possess the soul, they fetter it with contemptible pride, paltry ambitions. Down there are three hundred people, who have minds, and who are educated, who have physical and moral courage, who have honest consciences and manly characters. Very well; those three hundred clever, brave men, those three hundred wills, those consciences, those intelligences—what do they all want, without exception, at any cost?'
'To be Minister.'
'Minister—at any cost whatever. And in that unrelenting pursuit, pray ask yourself, does not the mind ever go miserably to waste? Does not that mind, capable of creating wonders of beauty and utility, if it were applied to the arts and sciences, often accomplish nothing?'
'It is true,' he admitted.