"And I never thought to ask you," he remarked.
"We must have no secrets now," she said, with a delightful smile. "Leslie Borrowdean came to see me this afternoon, and he was very anxious about you. He declared that you wanted to postpone your great meetings in the North until after you had made some independent investigations in some of the manufacturing centres. Poor Sir Leslie! You had frightened him so completely that he was scarcely coherent."
Mannering smiled a little gravely. It was like coming back to earth.
"Politics with Borrowdean are so much a matter of pounds, shillings and pence that the bare idea of his finding himself a day further away from office frightens him to death," he said. "We are all like the pawns, to be moved about the chessboard of his life."
"He is certainly a very self-centred person," she remarked; "but do you know, I am really a little curious to know how you succeeded in frightening him so thoroughly."
"I had a fright myself," Mannering said. "I was made to feel for an hour or so like a Rip van Winkle with the cobwebs hanging about me--Rip van Winkle looking out upon a new world!"
"You a Rip van Winkle!" she laughed. "What was it that man who wrote in the _Nineteenth Century_ called you last week? 'The most precise and far-seeing of our politicians.'"
"The men who write in reviews," he murmured, "sometimes display the most appalling ignorance. There was also some one in the _Saturday Review_ who alluded to me last week as a library politician. My friend quoted that against me. 'A man who essays to govern a people he knows nothing of.' It was one of the labour party who wrote it, I know, but it sticks."
"You are not losing confidence in yourself, surely?" she remarked, smiling.
"My views are unchanged, if that is what you mean," he answered. "I believe I know what is good for the people, and when I am sure of it I shall not be afraid to take up the gauntlet. But I must be quite sure."
"You puzzle me a little," she admitted. "Has any one written more convincingly than you? Arguments which are founded upon logic and statistics must yield truth, and you have set it down in black and white."
"On the other hand," he said, "my unlearned but eloquent friend dismissed all statistics, all the science of argument and deduction, with the wave of a not too scrupulously clean hand. 'Figures,' he said, 'are dead things. They are the playthings of the charlatan politician, who, by a sort of mental sleight of hand, can make them perform the most wonderful antics. If you desire the truth, seek it from live things. If you desire really to call yourself the champion of the people, come and see for yourself how they are faring. Figures will not feed them, nor statistics keep them from the great despair. Come and let me show you the sinews of the country, whether they are sound or rotten. You cannot see them through your library walls. It is only the echo of their voice which you hear so far off. If you would really be the people's man, come and learn something of the people from their own lips.' This is what my friend said to me."