"What are you meditating this morning?" asked Eleanor. "A sonnet, or another speech on the Sugar Duties?" She had seen and heard enough to know from what fount it was that Sir Thomas derived the stream of his Parliamentary eloquence. "Neither anything so sentimental on the one hand, nor anything so prosaic on the other," answered Gerald. "I was better employed in listening to the birds, and in marking how the brown buds were here and there beginning to open themselves to the sun." "You are easily satisfied. I should have thought that the Ride would have had more attractions for you." "Not at all. In London, humanity is so plentiful that trees and birds seem sometimes the best of company. In the country, where trees and birds are so common, a fresh face is sometimes a godsend." "But you, who have been so accustomed to change--to seeing fresh faces and visiting strange places--must surely find it both dull and tedious to spend your days among blue-books and parliamentary reports, wading through columns of dreary statistics, and concocting speeches which another than yourself will deliver?" "I did find it both dull and tedious at first, but I don't find it so now." "And why do you not find it so now?" He would have liked to answer: "Because your presence here has made my work glad. Because I could count no work as slavery if through it I were brought into contact with you. Because, since I have learned to love you, life has assumed for me an altogether different complexion from that which it wore before--is imbued with altogether different purposes and ambitions." But the time was not yet ripe for him to say all this, or even part of it. Some more commonplace answer must be found to her question. "I think," said he, "it must be because human motives and human purposes are so intimately mingled with the dry bones of politics, that politics exercise such a strange fascination over nearly everyone who is brought into close contact with them. Certainly to me, and that no very long time ago, they seemed the dryest and most uninteresting study to which a man could devote his time." "But you have seen reason to change your opinion since then?" said Eleanor. "I have," said Gerald, emphatically. "From the moment I leapt into the arena--from the moment that I ceased to be a looker-on and became a gladiator myself--in the very humblest of positions though it was--my blood seemed to warm to the struggle. I buckled my armour round me with gladness at the thought that I was about to contend with shapes of bone and sinew; that my life need no longer have to content itself with pottering about among the petty dilettanteisms of Art, while never quite certain in my own mind whether it was Nature's intention that I should develop into a man of genius or degenerate into a blockhead." Eleanor laughed. "Then you think you have found your right groove at last," she said.