“I have told you,” he went on, “of her amazing beauty, the golden-white beauty of the world’s last aristocracy. But, as though that were not enough, she was ambitious; she was a lady of parts, and she increasingly sought the company of those with whom she could discuss, deeply and seriously, the current problems of this vexed time. She was, you understand, tremendously interested in improving people; and politically she was, of course, a Die-Hard; for, as the daughter of a great house, her earliest experience in literature was _The Morning Toast_, to which she had remained faithful even when she grew up, with that tenacity peculiar to all readers of that remarkable journal. And so, when the franchise was extended to women, she, even before Lady Astor, raised the standard of rampant womanhood; and the world was given the rare sensation of seeing, and the House of Commons the rare privilege of welcoming, among its foremost legislators, the loveliest lady in the land, or any land. Words cannot describe the effect she made as she stood, indisputably the first of the twelve other ladies who had won their right of entrance into the Lower House, in all her glorious height and golden beauty among the dolorous decorations of that crypt which the glamour of centuries had raised to the majesty of Britain’s greatest institution. “It was at this time that the man I have referred to came into her life; and it chanced for her to be a fortunate occasion, for without him her political career had been a barren thing. She could not make up a speech. Memorise and speak a speech she could, so amazingly well that the populace cried out with wonder at one so gifted with brains and elocution as well as with beauty--but she could not make up a speech. The brains in her speeches, which were rapidly winning for her a foremost position among the Die-Hards, were not hers. Her friend wrote her speeches for her. He did them gladly, happy and honoured to be of use to her. He ‘helped’ her with her speeches, so that she seemed not to be aware that his was every idea, every phrase, every epigram, everything--and that was his greatest pleasure, his subtle ‘helping’ her to a place of honour and esteem for something besides her beauty. Himself, though a gentleman, was not a Die-Hard: he was a man of ideas. He had a brain like Clapham Junction, going this way and that way and every way at the same time; and he could, no doubt, have made a great political name for himself, but he was by nature a soldier and by temperament adventurous, so that it pleased him infinitely more to ‘help’ the lady of his dreams to political fame rather than to bid for it in his own person.