CHAPTER XII The weeks that followed offered no particular A event, but were none the less important to this history. Coryston was called off to an election in the north, where he made a series of speeches which perhaps in the end annoyed the Labor candidate he was supporting as much as the Tory he was attacking. For, generally reckoned a Socialist by friends and opponents alike, he preached openly, on this occasion, that Socialism was absurd, and none but fools would upset kings and cabinets, to be governed by committees. And on one of his spare evenings he wrote a letter to Edward Newbury, loftily accepting him as a brother-in-law--on conditions. "I see no reason," he wrote, "why you and I should not be good friends--if only I can induce you to take the line of common humanity in this pitiful case, which, as you know, has set our whole neighborhood aflame. Your _opinions_ on divorce don't matter, of course, to me--nor mine to you. But there are cruelties of which all men are judges. And if you must--because of your opinions--commit yourself to one of them--why then, whether you marry Marcia or no, you and I can't be friends. It would be mere hypocrisy to suppose it. And I tell you quite frankly that I shall do my best to influence Marcia. There seem to me to be one or two ways out of the business, that would at any rate relieve you of any active connivance with what you hold to be immorality. I have dealt with them in my letter to your father. But if you stand on your present fiat--"Separate--or go--" well, then you and I'll come to blows--Marcia or no Marcia. And I warn you that Marcia is at bottom a humanist--in the new sense--like me." To which Newbury promptly replied: "My dear Coryston--I am quite prepared to discuss the Betts case with you, whenever you return, and we can meet. But we cannot discuss it to any useful purpose, unless you are prepared to allow me, before we begin, the same freedom of opinion that you claim for yourself. It is no good ruling out opinion--or rather conviction--and supposing that we can agree, apart from conviction, on what is cruelty in this case, and what isn't. The omitted point is vital. I find it difficult to write about Marcia--perhaps because my heart and mind are so full of her. All I can say is that the happiness she has brought me by consenting to be my wife must necessarily affect all I think and feel. And to begin with, it makes me very keen to understand and be friends with those she loves. She is very much attached to you--though much troubled often, as of course you know, by the line you have taken down here.... Let me know when you return--that I may come over to Knatchett. We can be brothers, can't we?--even though we look at life so differently." But to this Coryston, who had gone on to a Labor Congress in Scotland, made no reply.