“Yes, you are clever enough to feel that you have a mind; and mind is a restless inmate of body: it craves occupation of some sort, and regular occupation too; it needs its daily constitutional exercise. Do you give your mind that?” “I am sure I don’t know, but my mind is always busying itself about something or other.” “In a desultory way,--with no fixed object.” “True.” “Write a book, and then it will have its constitutional.” “Nay, my mind is always writing a book (though it may not publish one), always jotting down impressions, or inventing incidents, or investigating characters; and between you and me, I do not think that I do bore myself so much as I did formerly. Other people bore me more than they did.” “Because you will not create an object in common with other people: come into Parliament, side with a party, and you have that object.” “Do you mean seriously to tell me that you are not bored in the House of Commons?” “With the speakers very often, yes; but with the strife between the speakers, no. The House of Commons life has a peculiar excitement scarcely understood out of it; but you may conceive its charm when you observe that a man who has once been in the thick of it feels forlorn and shelved if he lose his seat, and even repines when the accident of birth transfers him to the serener air of the Upper House. Try that life, Chillingly.” “I might if I were an ultra-Radical, a Republican, a Communist, a Socialist, and wished to upset everything existing, for then the strife would at least be a very earnest one.” “But could not you be equally in earnest against those revolutionary gentlemen?” “Are you and your leaders in earnest against them? They don’t appear to me so.” Thetford was silent for a minute. “Well, if you doubt the principles of my side, go with the other side. For my part, I and many of our party would be glad to see the Conservatives stronger.”