"It's a bit of overwork perhaps. I'm off colour. Things have gone flat. That's why I'm up here." He did a very absurd thing. He threw away a quarter-smoked cigarette and almost immediately demanded another. "You've been a little immoderate with your statistics," said Melville. Chatteris said something that struck Melville as having somehow been said before. "Election, progress, good of humanity, public spirit. None of these things interest me really," he said. "At least, not just now." Melville waited. "One gets brought up in an atmosphere in which it's always being whispered that one should go for a career. You learn it at your mother's knee. They never give you time to find out what you really want, they keep on shoving you at that. They form your character. They rule your mind. They rush you into it." "They didn't rush me," said Melville. "They rushed me, anyhow. And here I am!" "You don't want a career?" "Well-- Look what it is." "Oh! if you look at what things are!" "First of all, the messing about to get into the House. These confounded parties mean nothing--absolutely nothing. They aren't even decent factions. You blither to damned committees of damned tradesmen whose sole idea for this world is to get overpaid for their self-respect; you whisper and hobnob with local solicitors and get yourself seen about with them; you ask about the charities and institutions, and lunch and chatter and chum with every conceivable form of human conceit and pushfulness and trickery----" He broke off. "It isn't as if _they_ were up to anything! They're working in their way, just as you are working in your way. It's the same game with all of them. They chase a phantom gratification, they toil and quarrel and envy, night and day, in the perpetual attempt to persuade themselves in spite of everything that they are real and a success----" He stopped and smoked. Melville was spiteful. "Yes," he admitted, "but I thought _your_ little movement was to be something more than party politics and self-advancement----?" He left his sentence interrogatively incomplete. "The condition of the poor," he said. "Well?" said Chatteris, regarding him with a sort of stony admission in his blue eyes. Melville dodged the look. "At Sandgate," he said, "there was, you know, a certain atmosphere of belief----" "I know," said Chatteris for the second time. "That's the devil of it!" said Chatteris after a pause. "If I don't believe in the game I'm playing, if I'm left high and dry on this shoal, with the tide of belief gone past me, it isn't _my_ planning, anyhow. I know the decent thing I ought to do. I mean to do it; in the end I mean to do it; I'm talking in this way to relieve my mind. I've started the game and I must see it out; I've put my hand to the plough and I mustn't go back. That's why I came to London--to get it over with myself. It was running up against you, set me off. You caught me at the crisis." "Ah!" said Melville.