The National Progressive League, under whose auspices the meeting at Stepney had been held, had originated in the minds of certain members of the extreme Parliamentary left, the most active of whom were the late Sir Ephraim Phayre, the chief, and Mr. Aloysius Gleam, his henchman. Its primary object was to form a strong wing of the Liberal party, in which extremists, opportunists, and the waverers on the edge of the Independent Labour Party might rally together around practical Collectivist principles. It sought to embrace academic Radicalism and the interests of the Labour Party in a broader scheme of imperial policy.

When Goddard threw himself into the work of the League it had all the promise and vitality of youth. Centres were being rapidly established throughout the kingdom. Systems of lectures on social and political subjects were being organised. Meetings, conferences, and demonstrations were arranged under its auspices. Pamphlets were published from its headquarters in London, as well as a vigorously written journal. Besides thus working on its own account, the League was gradually gathering influence enough to constitute itself a great agency. It sent speakers to political gatherings, and canvassers to Parliamentary and municipal elections. It gained the confidence of the great trades unions and operatives’ associations, and provided helpers in labour conflicts. It was in touch at all points with political life—a vast undertaking, offering an unlimited field for the energies of its supporters. Its Statistical Bureau alone was capable of almost infinite extension.

It was with a thrilling sense of pride that Goddard found himself in the full stream of the new movement. Every day brought him an added sense of power and responsibility. To qualify himself for the tasks that devolved upon him, he read deeply and widely, setting himself resolutely to fill in the gaps of his self-education. He studied French, German, Latin, beginning the latter with mensa, like a child, and strove to train his taste and judgment by extending his acquaintance with pure literature. His vigorous intellect assimilated rapidly, both from books and men, and gradually, as the months passed into years, his views became clearer, his judgments more penetrating, and his grasp more sure and far-reaching.

The League work, and afterwards his election to a political club, brought him into frequent contact with Aloysius Gleam. The latter was anxious to keep in touch with Goddard, not only because he foresaw in him a valuable man for the party, but also because he took a keen personal interest in the young man’s career. He had all a shrewd, generous little man’s vanity in extending to a big man the patronage he felt would soon not be needed. To his friends he prophesied great things of Goddard. He introduced him to the chief shortly before Sir Ephraim’s death.

“It is courageous of you to tackle that powerful-faced young giant,” said Sir Ephraim, laughing.

“Yes,” replied Gleam, “I feel like a hen hatching an ostrich egg.”

And when the young ostrich stalked out of the shell, and in the course of time took up its position in the world as a superior bird, Aloysius Gleam looked on with undisguised satisfaction.

Once, in the early days of Goddard’s affluence, Gleam interrupted a warm discussion.

“Why don’t you take elocution lessons?”

“I never thought of it,” Goddard replied. “I have no desire to become an elegant orator.”

“It might be useful to you in your private speech,” said Gleam, looking at him in his shrewd way. Goddard frowned perplexedly. Then he understood and coloured slightly.

“I don’t want to pretend to be better than I am,” he said. “If my speech shows I belong to the people, so much the better. No one will think the worse of me.”

Gleam laid his hand kindly on the young democrat’s arm—they were walking up and down the lobby of the House—and broke out into an impetuous harangue. The young man’s argument was easily demolished.

The result was that in this, as in many other things, he took Gleam’s advice. He was no fool for angry pride to furnish him with cap and bells. He saw, when he came to consider the matter dispassionately, that though London Doric might be sweet in the ears of the proletariat, it grated on the finer susceptibilities of the House of Commons. Whereupon he set to work upon elocution with the tireless energy of a Demosthenes.

So in seven years he had gained for himself an ever-growing reputation. The great reviews had opened their pages to him. The League intrusted him with responsible work. He was on the London County Council, and a seat in Parliament awaited him at no distant future.

To please his wife, Daniel had not settled down in Sunington. He had bidden farewell reluctantly, for it meant the sundering of many ties, and the surrendering of many interests. But Lizzie had been insistent. Visions of domestic harmony, disturbed by incursions of Captain Jenkyns in an advanced state of profanity, had prompted earnest beseeching. Perhaps she was wise; for soon after her marriage the old reprobate, to the exceeding great scandal of the neighbourhood, took to himself a mistress-housekeeper in the shape of a flaunting, red-faced female of pugnacious instincts, who had retained possession of the house after his death. Their goings on, Emily and Sophie declared, had been something awful.

Lizzie had been well out of it. Daniel would never have been able to hold up his head for the disgrace; whereat Daniel had smiled somewhat sardonically. His skin was a little too tough, he said, for vicarious reprobation.

But Lizzie had other and more private reasons for wishing to migrate. In the first flush of her dignity she had shrunk from the streets with which she had been too grossly familiar during her early girlhood. She had larked with the butcher’s boy, played kiss in the ring with the greengrocer’s assistant, and kept very serious company with Joe Forster the tobacconist. Such daily reminiscences are apt to prove embarrassing. The translated Lizzie had felt out of her element in Sunington. So, to please her, Daniel had come into London and taken a house in Notting Hill, where they had remained during the seven years of their married life.

It was late when Goddard stood before the familiar door, on his return from the Stepney meeting. An expression of impatience escaped his lips as he noticed a light in the basement; otherwise, with the exception of the faintly illuminated fanlight, the house was in darkness. He let himself in with his latch-key, and walking the length of the dim passage, descended the kitchen stairs, groping his way. He opened the kitchen door softly, and found the housemaid asleep, with her head on the deal table. Awakened by his presence, the girl started in some confusion.

“Why haven’t you gone to bed, Jane?”

His tone was less one of reprimand than that of a man repeating a disagreeable formula.

“Mistress was very poorly to-night, sir, and I thought I had better sit up till you came.”

He nodded, looked at her sombrely from beneath his eyebrows.

“Did you see her to bed comfortably?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

“Hasn’t Miss Jenkyns been here?”

“No, sir. Miss Sophie came for an hour this afternoon.”

“Very well,” said Goddard, turning on his heel. “Go to bed now, there’s a good girl. You must be tired.”

He went heavily up the stairs again, turned off the gas in the hall, and continued his ascent. On the first floor he paused, leaned his ear against the bedroom door, and listened. Satisfied with a sound of heavy breathing within, he mounted the next flight and lit the gas in his own study, stirred a blackening fire, and after warming his hands for a few seconds, sat down at his writing-table.

It was a plainly furnished room, lined with books in sober bindings, sloping and falling, with great gaps, untidily, in the shelves. A great table, covered with a red baize cloth and piled with papers, pamphlets, and odd volumes, occupied the centre. An old arm-chair, its seat filled with a set of blue books, was drawn up near the fire. The mantelpiece was bare, save for a few pipes and smoker’s odds and ends. Above was pinned a broad-sheet almanac issued by some Reform organisation. Nowhere appeared any attempt at adornment.

Goddard sat in his round-backed wooden chair, opened a couple of letters that had come by the evening post, and then drummed with his fingers on the table in a preoccupied way. The setting of his face was too stern to express pain, and yet the deep vertical furrow between the brows and the tightly compressed lips indicated thoughts far removed from joyousness. At last he shook himself, brushed his hair from his forehead with a hasty gesture, and drawing a great breath, which ended like a sigh, separated some papers from the chaotic mass, and set to work on them, pen in hand. He worked for half-an-hour, only pausing to fill and light a pipe, and then with a yawn he rose and went through the communicating door into the adjoining room. A camp bedstead and the bare bedroom requisites were all that it contained. His seven years of affluence had brought him no sense of the minor luxuries of life. His personal tastes were as simple as when he lodged in the little top-floor-back in the working folks’ street in Sunington.

With his watch he drew from his waistcoat pocket the card he had received at Stepney: “Lady Phayre, 15 Queen’s Court Mansions.” He had forgotten her existence. He glanced at the card rather contemptuously, tore it across, and threw it into the grate. Then he undressed and slept the sleep of the weary man.

The next morning he began his breakfast alone, although the table was laid for two. As he ate, he ran through his correspondence, and jotted down notes in his pocket-book. He was a busy man, particularly occupied just now with heavy committee-work on the Council, and sundry organisation schemes connected with the League, and every moment was of value.

Presently the door opened, and Lizzie entered. She did not meet his following glance, but came forward with sullen, downcast eyes, and silently took her place at the table. The seven years had pressed upon her with the weight of fourteen. The devil had walked off with his own beauty. Although she was barely thirty, the plump freshness of youth had gone. The pink cheeks had paled and grown flabby; round contours had fallen into puffiness; the pout of the soft lips had relaxed into unlovely looseness of mouth marked by marring lines. A common, slatternly woman, with loose untidy hair and swollen eyelids, and dressed in an old morning wrapper, she was as unlike the rosebud bride of Sunington as the light is unlike the darkness; and yet by the inexorable law of development she was the same woman.

She poured herself out a cup of tea and broke some dry bread on her plate. Neither had spoken. Goddard’s brow darkened a little as he went on with his breakfast and his papers. She stole from time to time a shifting glance at him. The expression of absorbed interest on his dark face irritated her. The dead silence became unbearable. Suddenly she thrust back her chair a few inches, and struck the table sharply with her fingers.

“For God’s sake say something, can’t you,” she cried half-hysterically.

Goddard looked up gravely and laid down his pencil.

“What can I say to you, Lizzie?”

“Anything. Curse me, nag at me—anything; only don’t sit there as if I was the scum of the earth and you God Almighty.”

“Well, you have broken your promise once more. What else can I tell you? You can’t expect me to be pleased, and I see no good in cursing and nagging. So I hold my tongue.”

“I wish I was dead,” said Lizzie bitterly.

Goddard shrugged his shoulders. He had done his best according to his lights, and he had failed. Sometimes his heart echoed her wish.

“You have only yourself to thank,” he said.

“Have I? I’ve not got you to thank for anything. Oh dear, no! You know you hate me. You never did care for me. Even when we was first married you cared for your dirty old politics more than you did for me. Oh, why didn’t I marry Joe Forster? He has three big shops now, and can hold up his head as much as you can, for all you’re a County Councillor and have your name in the newspapers. And what good does that do to me, I’d like to know? It’s all your fault, every bit your fault, and you drive me to it; you know you do, and you’d be glad if I dropped down dead now.”

It was not a new story. Her words had no longer power to move him to anger. He accepted her grimly as a burden he had to bear through life.

“We made a mistake in marrying, Lizzie,” he said. “We both found it out long ago. I was not the sort of man you wanted, and perhaps I ought to have remained single. But I have done my duty by you honestly, and—so help me, God—I always shall. What is it you want that I do not try to give you?”

Many and many a woman, when she has been asked that question, the helpless question across the league-sundering gulf, has answered, aloud or dumbly, in a great yearning: “Love, a breath of passion, a touch of tenderness.” But in Lizzie that craving had never been deeper than the bloom on her cheek, and with the bloom it had perished. There are natures too common for the need of love, which is an instinct upwards of the soul. Instead, she answered querulously: “Why don’t you give me some money, and let me live away, somewhere?”

“To do God knows what with yourself? Not I, unless you would like this sort of thing.” He took from among the circulars with which he was daily deluged a chance-sent prospectus of a Home, and put it before her. She glanced at it, and then crumpled it up fiercely, and threw it into the fire.

“If you’re going to do that with me, you’d better look sharp, I can tell you,” she cried, trembling with sudden rage. “How long have you been making that little plan?”

“It is no plan. You could only go in there of your own free will. My only plan is to shelter you here, and make life as happy for you as you will let me.”

Lizzie sniffed contemptuously.

“What did you send for that thing for?”

“It came quite by chance.”

“That’s a damn lie!”

He bent forward, took her wrist, and looked at her sternly between the eyes, which lowered, abashed.

“You know I never tell lies,” he said. “I tell you that you shall never go to such a place unless you wish to. But you shall stay in my house. And listen to me. If this goes on much longer, I shall have to engage a special attendant to live here, who will watch you like a cat. It will be a disgrace for you that you can well spare yourself. So be warned, and turn over a new leaf.”

He rose, opened the morning paper, and skimmed through the news summary. Lizzie rubbed the wrist that he had held in an unconsciously tight grip, and then she began to whimper. But her tears had lost their effect upon Daniel. They came with maudlin frequency.

At last she broke into a great spluttering sob. “I have been miserable ever since little Jacky died. I wish I had died with him.”

The name of the child, dead three years before, touched the man’s heart. Of the two, perhaps he had felt the loss the more. Standing behind her, he laid a hand upon her shoulder, and said in a rough, tenderer tone—

“It was hard, my girl. But you are not the only one. Other women have been left desolate.”

“And other women have wished they were dead. I expect most of ’em do. It’s beastly to be a woman.”

“Well, you can’t help that,” he said grimly, resuming his newspaper. “You had better try and make the best of it.”

The servant entered with his boots, which she placed on the hearthrug. When he had laced them up he stamped them into ease and looked more cheerful. A man’s moral tone always undergoes a subtle change with the donning of the morning boot or the evening slipper.

“I shall be back for supper early this evening,” he said, “so you won’t be lonely. Now be a good girl. Do.”

She made no reply, although he had spoken kindly and forgivingly, and she knew from past experience that the subject of the last night’s slip would not be alluded to again. As soon as he had gone, she drew from her dressing-gown pocket a soiled penny novelette, and settled down to her idle morning by the fireside. In the afternoon Emily came, a weary, shrivelled woman, to remain with her for a few hours. For some time past Daniel had made the sisters a secret allowance, as compensation for loss of time in their dressmaking business, on the condition of their keeping Lizzie company. Society in the ordinary sense she had none. It was the loneliness and idleness that had crushed her. At first it had seemed a grand thing to wear pretty dresses, and keep her hands white, and give over all the work of the house to the servants. Now the habit of sloth was ingrained. She had no occupation, no interests. Even her girlish fondness for finery was gone. The costume that gave her least trouble to put on was the one she selected. Like the once free-swimming sea-anemone she had grown encrusted to her rock, stretching out lazy tentacles. When her cousin arrived she was still attired in the old dressing-gown and down-at-heel slippers she had thrust on as she got out of her bed. Emily, who was precise and businesslike, hurried her off with an indignation not staled by custom, to dress herself decently. During her toilet she made the usual confession to Emily with pleas in mitigation, and the usual indictment of Daniel. But Emily was not sympathetic. She banged in the drawer, where she had been arranging Lizzie’s slovenly kept under-linen, and pulled out another viciously.

“You should have married a man like father,” she said. “That’s the sort of husband you should have had, who would have pulled you out of bed by your hair and given you a good sound hiding. Daniel’s thousands of miles too good for you.”

Lizzie turned round and faced her passionately, straining at the ends of her stay-lace.

“I wish sometimes he would beat me. There! I’ll make him do it one of these days.”

“Dan’s not the man to treat his wife like a dog.”

“No. He treats me like a tabby-cat—beneath his notice. He has always done it. I may be a silly fool, but it doesn’t require much intellec’ to know when folks look upon you as the dirt beneath their feet.”

“Well, the dirt ought to be grateful when a man like Daniel condescends to put his foot upon it,” replied Emily with conviction.

“Why didn’t you marry him yourself?” said Lizzie witheringly.

“Elizabeth Goddard, you’re no better than a fool,” returned Emily. “And if you’ve nothing pleasanter to say, I’ll go back home.”

As on many previous occasions, the threat moved Lizzie to tears, then to reproaches, finally to entreaties and submission. When peace was made they went off on a shopping expedition to Kensington High Street, where Lizzie, to make amends, bought her cousin a bonnet, and interested herself in a discussed readjustment of trimming. But outside a newsvendor’s Emily pointed with her umbrella to an item in the contents bill of a Radical evening paper: “Dan Goddard at Stepney—Enthusiastic Reception.”

“Oh yes, I see,” said Lizzie petulantly. “I suppose you think I ought to fall down and worship him when he comes back.”

Her ill-humour returned, and she regretted the bonnet—an additional grievance.

“If it wasn’t for him I’m blessed if I’d ever come near you,” said Emily in the discussion that followed.

And so it happened that when Goddard came home he found his wife in a fit of sulks. The experiment of a domestic evening failed, as it had done so many times before. She replied monosyllabically to his attempts at conversation, refused point-blank his offer to put her into a cab and drive her to a theatre—a wild delight of past years—and retired to bed at nine o’clock.

Goddard mounted to his own den, and plunged into his work with the zest of a man who has conscientiously acquitted himself of an irksome duty, and is free to apply himself without scruple to more congenial occupations.