Near at hand two men practised trick skating, keeping clear the space about them with their whirling limbs. They swept about with eyes intent, and suddenly one or other would twirl, describe a circle with an outflung leg and recover, with an absurd hop. Clever and difficult no doubt, but so very ugly that it seemed not worth doing. The stout man’s hop seemed as though it must smash the ice. Between their dervish whirls they talked. They were arguing. Amiably quarrelling; the occasional hysterical squeal in the voice of the stout man revealing “politics.” They were at loggerheads over the housekeeping, the lime-lit, well-paid, public housekeeping, “affairs,” the difficult responsible important business that was “beyond the powers of women,” that was also “dirty work for which women were too good”; wrangling. The stout man executed a terrific twirl and brought up facing his opponent who had just spoken. He advanced upon him bent and sliding, arms dangling low: “Just _so_,” he chanted amiably and, recovering the upright, presented a face really foolish, a full-moon foolishness, kindly perfection of inability to see further than his good British nose: “We’re back at what I told Hammond this morning: we _can’t afford_ to ignore the _Trades Union Secretaries_.” With a swift turn he was off before the other man could respond, skating away beyond their enclosure, smiling his delight, staring ahead, with wise eyes, at nothing at all but the spectacle of his opponent caught out and squashed. The spectacle of his complacency was profoundly disquieting. He was the typical kindly good-natured John Bull. Gently nurtured, well-educated, “intelligent,” ready to take any amount of time and trouble in “getting at facts” and “thinking things out.” And he was a towering bully. Somewhere within his naïve pugnacity was the guilty consciousness of being more pleased in downing an opponent than concerned for human welfare. There was no peace of certainty in him. He had scored and was flushed with victory. And all over English politics was this perpetual prize-fighting. The power of life and death was in the hands of men playing for victory; for their own side. Morning and evening in some hotel that big man’s voice boomed incessantly. Behind it a kindly disposition and a set of fixed ideas. No mind. “Don’t you skeete?” Making for the bench, bent forward to reach it hands first was the younger Croydon girl; behind her the other, rallentando, balancing to a standstill. She had greeted them, ere she was aware, with the utmost enthusiasm. Smiling in their way, a gentle relaxation of the features that left them composed, they stood about her, pleased to see and greet a stranger who was also an old friend, renewing their great adventure. At the same time they were innocently rebuking her outbreak.