"I love meeting you," she said. "I love your going because it means that afterwards you will come again. I love this--this slipping out to you. But up there, there is a room in the house that is _my_ place--me--my own. Nobody follows me there. I want to go on living, Stevenage, just as I am living now. I don't want to become someone's certain possession, to be just usual and familiar to anyone. No, not even to you." "But if you love," I cried. "To you least of all. Don't you see?--I want to be wonderful to you, Stevenage, more than to anyone. I want--I want always to make your heart beat faster. I want always to be coming to you with my own heart beating faster. Always and always I want it to be like that. Just as it has been on these mornings. It has been beautiful--altogether beautiful." "Yes," I said, rather helplessly, and struggled with great issues I had never faced before. "It isn't," I said, "how people live." "It is how I want to live," said Mary. "It isn't the way life goes." "I want it to be. Why shouldn't it be? Why at any rate shouldn't it be for me?" § 4 I made some desperate schemes to grow suddenly rich and powerful, and I learnt for the first time my true economic value. Already my father and I had been discussing my prospects in life and he had been finding me vague and difficult. I was full of large political intentions, but so far I had made no definite plans for a living that would render my political ambitions possible. It was becoming apparent to me that for a poor man in England, the only possible route to political distinction is the bar, and I was doing my best to reconcile myself to the years of waiting and practice that would have to precede my political début. My father disliked the law. And I do not think it reconciled him to the idea of my being a barrister that afterwards I hoped to become a politician. "It isn't in our temperament, Stephen," he said. "It's a pushing, bullying, cramming, base life. I don't see you succeeding there, and I don't see myself rejoicing even if you do succeed. You have to shout, and Strattons don't shout; you have to be smart and tricky and there's never been a smart and tricky Stratton yet; you have to snatch opportunities and get the better of the people and misrepresent the realities of every case you touch. You're a paid misrepresenter. They say you'll get a fellowship, Stephen. Why not stay up, and do some thinking for a year or so. There'll be enough to keep you. Write a little." "The bar," I said, "is only a means to an end." "If you succeed." "If I succeed. One has to take the chances of life everywhere." "And what is the end?" "Constructive statesmanship." "Not in that way," said my father, pouring himself a second glass of port, and turned over my high-sounding phrase with a faint hint of distaste; "Constructive Statesmanship. No. Once a barrister always a barrister. You'll only be a party politician.... Vulgar men.... Vulgar.... If you succeed that is...."