I turned to watch the cars emptying and the new arrivals dodging or seeking out the reporters. My mother had come over from Cannes; my sister and her husband, Violet Loring and Laurence represented the family; and, if we had all tingled from the old man’s lash, that was long ago and inextricably in the part he chose to play. The older generation in the House of Commons and the younger generation in Fleet Street—men who won his respect by standing squarely up to him—came unurged to prove their regard for his fighting qualities and his generosity. “I deplore his politics,” said Crawleigh, “but he was a great public servant.” At such a time I refrained from suggesting that Crawleigh’s father had deplored the politics of Bright and Cobden. It is one curse of the party-system that an opponent must be dead before we admit that he may possibly not be damned. I was brought up to regard Lord Salisbury as a monster wherewith to frighten naughty children; my father, if he had been required to expose the Antichrist, would have pointed his finger unhesitatingly at Lord Beacons field. I thought over Crawleigh’s belated tribute as I took Barbara to our places. This imminent election might purge the House of those to whom the war—as Saltash told me frankly—had come as a god-send; but, if the adventurers into public life were not sent back to their counting-houses and newspaper-offices and bucket-shops, I feared that, with Bertrand, there would die an unparalleled tradition of integrity and devotion. My uncle had prepared himself for politics by half a lifetime of study, as Gladstone and Salisbury, Morley and Rosebery prepared themselves; of the men under thirty who entered the House with me in 1906, hardly one had not tried to equip himself by travel, by settlement-work, by experience in business or by the management of an estate. There seemed to be fewer servants of the public in 1918. “If he had scoffed less,” said Lady Dainton, “he would have done more.” I agreed privately, though I think his cynicism covered a disappointment of soul: he had come to England, as a brilliant, ambitious and sanguine boy, to reform the world; and the sluggish-witted, slow-speaking English had worn him down. To begin as an O’Connell and to end as “a great public servant” would have roused him to savage merriment. “How he would have despised all this!,” I whispered to Barbara, as the people whom he would not admit to his house hurried importantly into the more prominent seats. Ministers of the present and past, divines and pressmen, authors and diplomats poured in till every place seemed to be taken. A crowd began to collect at the doors; there was rather more noise than I thought seemly; and I was glad when the organ began to play.