Labrador (N.L.) -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Love stories, English
Whenever the rider tired, he could descend--comfortably at home
again--and examine the cyclometer to see how far he had been. In exactly
the same way the ordinary London Movement gives scope for the restless
and progressive impulse in human nature without the risk of personal
entanglements or any inconvenient disturbance of the milieu.
Marjorie considered the Movements about her. She surveyed the accessible
aspects of socialism, but that old treasure-house of constructive
suggestion had an effect like a rich château which had been stormed and
looted by a mob. For a time the proposition that "we are all Socialists
nowadays" had prevailed. The blackened and discredited frame remained,
the contents were scattered; Aunt Plessington had a few pieces, the Tory
Democrats had taken freely, the Liberals were in possession of a hastily
compiled collection. There wasn't, she perceived, and there never had
been a Socialist Movement; the socialist idea which had now become part
of the general consciousness, had always been too big for polite
domestication. She weighed Aunt Plessington, too, in the balance, and
found her not so much wanting indeed as excessive. She felt that a
Movement with Aunt Plessington in it couldn't possibly offer even
elbow-room for anybody else. Philanthropy generally she shunned. The
movements that aim at getting poor people into rooms and shouting at
them in an improving, authoritative way, aroused an instinctive dislike
in her. Her sense of humour, again, would not let her patronize
Shakespear or the stage, or raise the artistic level of the country by
means of green-dyed deal, and the influence of Trafford on her mind
debarred her from attempting the physical and moral regeneration of
humanity by means of beans and nut butter. It was indeed rather by the
elimination of competing movements than by any positive preference that
she found herself declining at last towards Agatha Alimony's section of
the suffrage movement.... It was one of the less militant sections, but
it held more meetings and passed more resolutions than any two others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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