Though I wish to gain influence--power perhaps; still the last thing I should desire would be political influence." "You might possibly escape that unwelcome possession," returned the earl.

"Half the House of Commons is made up of harmless dummies, who vote as we bid them." "A character, my lord, for which I am decidedly unfitted.

Until political conscience ceases to be a thing of traffic, until the people are allowed honestly to choose their own honest representatives, I must decline being of that number.

Shall we dismiss the subject ?" "With pleasure, sir." And courtesy being met by courtesy, the question so momentous was passed over, and merged into trivialities.

Perhaps the earl, who, as his pleasures palled, was understood to be fixing his keen wits upon the pet profligacy of old age, politics--saw, clearly enough, that in these chaotic days of contending parties, when the maddened outcry of the "people" was just being heard and listened to, it might be as well not to make an enemy of this young man, who, with a few more, stood as it were midway in the gulf, now slowly beginning to narrow, between the commonalty and the aristocracy.