The politician within the esoteric revolutionary ring, who did not know Lady Phayre, was like a Positivist ignorant of Auguste Comte. The analogy halts, however. Lady Phayre was far from being an evangelist; she was not even an apostle. She had been left with the key of a pleasant situation, and, like a wise woman, she used it. Her enemies called her insincere. If the late Sir Ephraim, they said, had sat as a Conservative, and had formed the cartilage as it were of a brilliant wing of that party, Lady Phayre’s flat would have become an audaciously unauthorised Primrose Habitation. But political opponents will say anything. Certainly she took no combative part in political warfare. Her functions were rather those of an etherealised _vivandière_ to the band. The members came exhausted into her drawing-room, where she revived them with pannikins of sympathy, and spread the delicate ointment of flattery over their bruises. Not but what she exposed herself in times of need to the dangers and fatigues of the campaign. She had risked typhoid in slums, and congestion of the lungs in draughty halls. She also kept bravely up with the march, picking her dainty way through prodigious quantities of speeches, pamphlets, and articles, both in type and manuscript. Now and then she stumbled sorely. Bimetallism was a morass, and trade statistics stone fences. On these occasions she would cry out for a helping hand, preferably that of Aloysius Gleam; after which she would survey herself with rueful introspection, and put to herself the question addressed to the immortal Scapin. Her mood of to-day followed one of these periodic rescuings. “Hendrick’s amendment is coming on this evening,” said Aloysius Gleam at last. “The audacity of it is novel enough. Come down. It will amuse you. Burnet has a lady’s ticket going a-begging.” “I have had enough of Hendrick for some time,” replied Lady Phayre. “He took me down to dinner last night at the M’Kays’, and could talk of nothing else. I wish you could put some sense into him.” “I wish I could. But a Collectivist who has broken loose is running headlong to destruction.” “That was what I told him. Push Collectivism to its logical conclusion, and we get Mr. Bellamy’s intolerable paradise. He got purple in the face, said he was nothing if not logical, insisted on the establishment of comparative values for different kinds of labour and products, and called me a reactionary because I asked him how the State was going to determine the number of mutton chops that would go to a sonnet.” “Is that phrase your own, Lady Phayre?” asked Gleam, pricking up his ears. “No,” she replied, with a little touch of audacity. “I snapped it up as an unconsidered trifle out of a review article.” “Goddard’s, I think, on Extremism as applied to Practical Politics.” “You are an encyclopaedia,” said Lady Phayre, laughing. “You know everything.” “Did you like the article?”