“Yes,” she said, “it is sometimes cruel to wake us from our dreams, and yet it is best, I think.”
“—You think it is best to modify our poetry with prose? Was it better to have awakened Shelley, and given us his ‘Prometheus’ with wooden limbs of a day’s social dogmatism, than to have let him make delicate music in the italian woods and by the italian shores, for ever sweet and fair?”
“So he told me,” said Alcock, “and I was very glad to hear it. The interests of all wealth, whether in land or in money, is identic. But we have no organization.—And Labour,” he added with a look to Maddock, “as Mr. Hawkesbury just told us, is organizing, if it is not already organized.”
If it had been possible for Mrs. Medwin to be amazed at anything, she would have been amazed at this. Hawkesbury had a few years ago been an employé on one of Medwin’s stations, the very station to which she was now on her road. This was a reflection which was positively annoying to her. “It would,” she had once simply remarked, “have been as well perhaps, if he had eaten some poisoned meat when he was there, as they used to say the troublesome blacks did. He is a danger to society.” Sydney Medwin, who liked to do his best to ruffle his mother’s serenity now and then, used not unfrequently to speak in praise of Hawkesbury (his friend Hawkesbury, a clever fellow too, and who would make his mark out here yet!) and had once even, as Gildea told Maddock, offered to introduce him to her. “You know, Sydney,” said Mrs. Medwin simply, “I am not interested in Mr. Hawkesbury. If you like to make up a shooting-party at Lathong,” (a station of Medwin’s in Victoria), “with all the men on the station, I daresay he would be pleased to join you.”—What, then, was the meaning of Mr. Alcock’s remark that this firebrand socialist, this impertinent journalist and pamphleteer, had been _just telling_ something to Mr. Alcock, Dr. Maddock, and presumably Sir Horace?
“I’m sure,” said Alcock with his politest manner again, “that we all of us cannot be too—too pleased to have found a lady who realized this, and could help us to what we so much want—a ... a sort of general rallying-point.—Nothing,” he proceeded, “struck me so much in England as the use that the political parties made of their social gatherings, and they tell me that this was much more the case once than it is at present.” Alcock found a certain amount of difficulty in saying that he thought women might, after all, be made of some use in political life, in a manner that should be pleasing to _this_ woman.