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The New Machiavelli by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
page 314 of 549 (57%)

My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of
the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain
impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The
National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and
Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold,
wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous
paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the
late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy,
crowded smoking-room with innumerable little tables and groups of
men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just
that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me
the Liberal note. The pensive member sits and hears perplexing
dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the
clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches
profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or
Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape. . . .

I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the
Club to doubt about Liberalism.

About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in
circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the
great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of
the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some
are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely,
dissociated men. At first one gets an impression of men going from
group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches
closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at
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