Later still, he ceased to speak of the president altogether. Remembering Limehouse, he could not give implicit trust to the prime minister; but the gossip that floated from Paris to London convinced him that M. Clemenceau was the only statesman in Europe and he was content to leave himself in the hands of a man whose rare, sardonic utterances embodied the ferocity which Dainton had expressed so much less concisely in his election speeches. Members of parliament, he told me, had duties nearer home. Labour menaces were more important than quibbles about frontiers: coal strikes and railway strikes, both leading through nationalization and civil war to ruin and the disruption of the empire, were the proper study of political mankind. Sir Roger no longer spoke of the British working-man as one of “our gallant boys”; and I was invited to penetrate the disguise that sheltered a Russian communist. Before I could do justice to this conception, he had found new duties even nearer to the hand of a patriot. “Bolshevism” was bad, but it soon ceased, in Dainton’s eyes, to be quite so bad as “profiteering”; and neither, by the middle of the summer, was so exasperating nor so tenacious of life as Irish irreconcilability. “If I could hold the wretched country under the sea for five minutes!,” he exploded. Fed on political catch-words and instructed by safe cartoons, Sir Roger Dainton, coalition-unionist member for the Crowley Division of Hampshire, would explain Ireland on alternate days by reference to the incurable dourness of the north and the ineradicable savagery of the south. He was the ‘pendulum voter’, the representative of all that is unstable, ill-informed and irresponsible in public life. For that I was prepared; for that Bertrand had sent me to study him. I was not prepared, however, to be accepted as a disciple and an ally. Dining weekly in Rutland Gate, I wondered whether the little man had ever before found any one who would listen to him: obviously, pathetically, he looked forward to our “good pow-wows”; and, when he saw me to the door and gave me a fresh cigar, still more when he said, “Then, next Tuesday as usual?”, I felt that I was being sent back to school with a sovereign in my hand and being invited to Crowley for my next leave-out day. My embarrassment was increased by a sense of black ingratitude. Sir Roger always made these meetings “an occasion within the meaning of the act”, as he called it, and opened his best champagne for me. When Barbara deserted me on the plea that we wanted to talk business and she would be in the way, Dainton redoubled his hospitality and became increasingly confused in speech. As I watched the clock, I would ask myself how such a man was admitted to the board of a company or tolerated in parliament; then, in a flash of revelation, I saw him as the type of all the class on which Sir Philip Saltash exercised the wiles of his publicity. Saltash was a logical inference from Dainton.