"Yes," said Cynthia, nodding her head; "I have noticed that, Harry, from the gallery, and--I think it's a bad sign." "The sign of the true Parliamentarian," said Mr. Devenish. "Perhaps," said Cynthia stubbornly. "Still a bad one." "Now why?" asked Mr. Devenish indulgently. Cynthia was certainly a very pretty woman. Let her talk! Cynthia colored and replied hotly: "Because it means that the four walls of that little chamber are closing in on you. The game inside, with its pauses, its coups, its man[oe]uvres, is becoming more important than the great interests and issues outside which you are there to decide. It means that in your thoughts the country and the constituency are growing smaller, and the green leather benches on which you sit becoming more and more important. If you don't find any debates dull, you are growing aloof from the country. You are becoming, as you say, a Parliamentarian. That means Parliament first, the country a bad second." Cynthia stopped abruptly. She had allowed herself to be betrayed into delivering a lecture upon politics to a past-master in the art, a man who, out of his forty-five years, had spent twenty in the House of Commons. She flushed. "But you must think me a fool," she cried. "I don't," Mr. Devenish exclaimed. "Yours is a definite point of view." He was not speaking seriously. For he was eager to learn so long as the learning came to him by word of mouth, and not from the printed page. "Tell me some more." He was considering no longer the prettiness of the woman, the changing lights upon her face. He was conceding respect to her judgment. Cynthia was mollified. She continued: "And here's something which to me makes many of the debates tedious and unreal. You all behave as if your ideal of a member of the House of Commons were a fossil on a shelf." Mr. Devenish laughed. "Why do you say that, Mrs. Rames?" "Because if a man changes his opinions ever so little during a course of years, he at once has the reports of his old speeches flung at his head in scathing accents, as though he had committed the meanest of crimes." "It's a party score," said Mr. Devenish. "Yes, but why?" Cynthia insisted. "You must all know that a man who is any use at all does change his opinions as his experience widens. Surely that's true. What's the use of thought at all if it leaves you precisely where you were?" "Mrs. Rames," said Mr. Devenish, "I cannot dispute it."