“We must approach Art,” Burstall used to say, “as a goddess demanding a sacrifice; and the victim she asks of us is the Actual.” Well, the old days of Parliament are dead; and we no longer see St. Stephen’s presenting the appearance it used to present on “voting nights,” when helico after helico landed in the great square outside and legislatress after legislatress passed into the building to record her decision upon the affairs of the nation: when, by a quaint old survival, they used to bow to one another as they passed, while the opposing platforms bore them into the opposing lobbies; or when, on the occasion of some important speech, as many as five hundred auditors would assemble in the dictaphone room, to catch, in awestruck silence, the very tones of a Hopedale or a Holroyd before they passed into the receiver. Those of us who belonged to those older Parliaments will look back with some regret at the pomp and circumstance which used to attend legislation in those days; and perhaps even suspect that some of our modern indifference to political issues is due to the disappearance of that pageantry which is so dear to English hearts. There is still an old-world enchantment that lingers about the House itself: and you might almost fancy that those voiceless figures which sit there now, admirably as the Tussaud family has caught the likenesses of our present-day legislators, were the ghosts of a distant past, when the voice of a Burke would stir his contemporaries to indignation and to endurance, or the receiving funnels vibrated to the delicate soprano of a Pulbrooke. CHAPTER XII HOME LIFE The word “home,” albeit of Teutonic origin, has in great measure outlived the conception it was designed to express.—DR. DIVES: _Life of Malthus_.