scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with
strange qualities the savour of these old associations.

That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall,
thrust himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once
held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible
profanation to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I
think, like to have the front benches left empty now for ever, or at
most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On
this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech."
Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect on
the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation. "Mr. G.," he
murmurs, "would not have done that," and laments a vanished subtlety
even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He is always gloomily disposed
to lapse into wonderings about what things are coming to, wonderings
that have no grain of curiosity. His conception of perfect conduct
is industrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked grooves
of the great recorded days. So infinitely more important to him is
the documented, respected thing than the elusive present.

Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl
is a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY
GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail,
however, in their clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant
consciousness of a morning's work free from either zeal or shirking,
they mingle with permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few
of the soberer type of business men, and relax their minds in the
discussion of the morning paper, of the architecture of the West
End, and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday
resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic "crushers."