“You must expect some kind of reaction.” “It’s been going on for six months now. . . . However, I’m more concerned with the shepherds than with the sheep.” It was only as the theatres emptied that I appreciated my uncle’s sardonic wisdom in sending me to study “the great movement of men” in the Turf and Stage. The government was then represented by Lord Lingfield, who danced—for exercise rather than pleasure—with Miss Maud Valance, of the Pall Mall Theatre, and by the Right Honourable Wilmot Dean, who refrained from dancing on the principle that a man must learn to walk before he can run and must be in a condition to stand before he can dance. What weight Mr. Dean and Lord Lingfield contributed to cabinet councils I am too ignorant to guess; at the Turf and Stage they demonstrated that ministers, in spite of a nonconformist head, were not killjoys; and those who did not get many chances of hailing convivial privy councillors by their Christian names took the opportunity when it came. “It’s about twenty-one years since Gladstone died,” I murmured to O’Rane. “It’s ‘new men, new manners’, with a vengeance.” In strident conversation with Wilmot Dean, I could hear ‘Blob’ Wister roaring the latest of his political creeds. For three months he had won consequence by purchasing in succession the _People’s Tribune_, the _St. Stephen’s Times_ and the _Daily Echo_. No one knew whence the money had been collected; no one that I ever met could tell me whence Wister himself sprang. He burst upon London like Sir Philip Saltash, like Wilmot Dean, like a third of the new men inside the government and on its outskirts, in response to the prime minister’s known desire for business talent. I was still watching the unsteady antics of Lingfield, when Sir Philip Saltash himself rose with a well-remembered lurch and bore down on us with the customary unlighted cigar swinging like a semaphore from the one side of his mouth to the other. “Come to inspect my bunch?,” he enquired, with a careless nod and a less careless scrutiny of our liqueurs. Then, as I hesitated for an answer: “You’re too dam’ superior for these times. When you’ve been in the game as long as I have . . . Funny thing! The first slogan I ever heard in the States was that politics was not a job for a gentleman; ten years later I heard it in Canada; I’ve heard it in Australia; and, from what I’ve seen of your rag, you’re sighing for the great days of Salisbury and Pitt and all that lot.” “I should hardly expect to find them here,” I said.