The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his fish at last."What will you do?" he asked her.
"Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel.
"Poor old chaps like me!" interjected the general.
"But that's not a programme," said the doctor.
"But Mr.Remington has published a programme," said Isabel.
The doctor cocked half an eye at me.
"In some review," the girl went on."After all, we're not going to elect the whole Liberal party in the Kinghamstead Division.I'm a Remington-ite!""But the programme," said the doctor, "the programme--""In front of Mr.Remington!"
"Scandal always comes home at last," said the doctor."Let him hear the worst.""I'd like to hear," I said."Electioneering shatters convictions and enfeebles the mind.""Not mine," said Isabel stoutly."I mean--Well, anyhow I take it Mr.Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle.""THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the beautiful long room and the ordered garden outside the bright clean windows.
"Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us already.The dust and blacks get worse and worse, Sissie?""They do," agreed Miss Gamer.
"Mr.Remington stands for construction, order, education, discipline.""And you?" said the doctor.
"I'm a good Remington-ite."
"Discipline!" said the doctor.
"Oh!" said Isabel."At times one has to be--Napoleonic.They want to libel me, Mr.Remington.A political worker can't always be in time for meals, can she? At times one has to make--splendid cuts."Miss Gamer said something indistinctly.
"Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham."Excellent things!
But I've a sort of memory--in my young days--we talked about something called liberty.""Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur from Margaret, and took up the defence."The old Liberal definition of liberty was a trifle uncritical.Privilege and legal restrictions are not the only enemies of liberty.An uneducated, underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost the possibility of liberty.There's no liberty worth a rap for him.Aman who is swimming hopelessly for life wants nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other liberty for it--until he gets out."Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing qualities of Liberalism.It was a good give-and-take talk, extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary issues of the electioneering outside.We all contributed more or less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted brows and occasional interjections."People won't SEE that," for example, and "It all seems so plain to me." The doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial and inconsistent.Isabel sat back with her black mop of hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face.
Her colour came and went with her vivid intellectual excitement;occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a lizard's tongue into the discussion.I remember chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet....
After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift in our car as far as the Lurky Committee Room, and that she should offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of the Lurky gasworkers.
On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said, climbing a tree--and a very creditable tree--for her own private satisfaction.It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, and I perceived she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too much importance to it.I had some difficulty in reassuring her.
And it's odd to note now--it has never occurred to me before--that from that day to this I do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that encounter.
And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the election, an inextinguishable flame; now she flew by on her bicycle, now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps in animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance Icould to talk to her--I had never met anything like her before in the world, and she interested me immensely--and before the polling day she and I had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast friends....
