"Amy, you're a shameless match-maker. First of all Raney and Sonia, then Jim and Violet——"
"As long as it isn't the other way round, I don't mind. Sonia isn't even a Catholic."
"Neither Jim nor Sonia will marry for years yet," I said. "People don't nowadays. You have a much better time unmarried; there's an element of uncertainty and interest about you...."
"There's far too much uncertainty," said Amy, with a sigh. "Sometimes I have perfect nightmares about Jim. You see, he is worth a woman's while, and I have a horror that he'll make some hideous mistake and then be too proud to wriggle out of it. However, don't let's meet trouble half-way."
I left House of Steynes two days later and crossed to Ireland. On the writing-table of my library at Lake House I found a picture-postcard representing the Singer Building, with the question, "Any news? Raney." I sent a postcard with an indifferent photograph of the landing-stage at Kingstown, inscribed with the words, "No news. George Oakleigh." Then I said good-bye to the life I had been leading since my return to England. Bertrand wired in October that an election was imminent, and I spent the autumn in an Election fur coat and an Election car, tearing from end to end of my constituency and delivering speeches for which—as Gibbon might have said—the part-author of "Thursday Essays" might afterwards have blushed with shame. I have fought but two elections, and the memory of the cheap pledges and cheaper pleasantries, the misleading handbills and vile posters—distributed impartially by either side—give me no feeling of moral elation.
And in 1906 the contamination seemed the more unwelcome for being superfluous. There was room for high thinking and lofty ideals at a time when the country went mad in its lust to restore Liberalism to power. Heaven knows what programme I could not have put forward so long as it radically reversed the measures and spirit of the Conservative administration!
Or so it seemed in the early weeks of the 1906 Session, when hundreds of new members pressed forward to take the Oath and sign the Roll of Parliament, each one as strong in the confidence of his electors, each one as resolved to bring in a new heaven and a new earth—and each one as innocent of parliamentary forms of procedure as myself.