Perhaps her own emotion was communicated to Ordith; perhaps he, perceiving it in her, realizing--as she did not--from what source it flowed, and trying to take advantage of it, was himself entrapped. He pursued a policy of what he described to himself as “talking big”; he played upon an imagination already excited. “I can’t bear to leave London,” he said. “And you are actually eager to go! Life centres here. The people in this room have their fingers on the pulse of the world.” “The politicians?” He smiled over her shoulder. “Yes. I know it is a middle-class fashion to despise them. I can’t despise men with power and knowledge. And not the politicians only. Everybody is here--the artists who matter, the thinkers who are in touch. And at this moment, a crisis in the history of the world, I am to go away.” He made it sound a tragedy. He knew that to Twenty Years the present is always the opportunity of mankind--and an unpromising Twenty Years it would be if it thought otherwise. He knew, too--for his shrewdness went deeper than the surface--that Twenty Years has an understanding of many truths that Disappointment, not Philosophy, describes subsequently as illusions. But, so far as his immediate purpose was concerned, it mattered nothing whether the ideas that dominated Margaret were illusory or not. Only the fact of their domination was of importance to him, for they were to be a means to his own dominion. He spun a web of dreams that he might entangle her in it. His voice, which he could tune to the very ring of sincerity, told her how the future was to be glorious. There was to be battle against all the powers of evil--a new political outlook, new relations between state and state, and between governors and governed. That was the mission of their generation. “We must grip the essentials,” he said. “We must permit no compromise. And, above all, we mustn’t lose ourselves in mere talk--we must act temperately, and according to a clearly-conceived plan.... And women!” he exclaimed. “What a tremendous chance! Your influence is growing every day; soon it will be direct as well as indirect. And then the best of you will not be content to manipulate the party strings at dinner-tables. You will be cutting them where they are obstructive. You will come with free hands--no stale tradition--no fear of precedent--no corruption of ideals.”