that you're going to stand for Parliament."

"That's true enough," he said, swelling a little.

"Could anything be finer?" she breathed. "What are you going to do?"

"I'll have to contest two-three hopeless seats. Then they'll give me
something safe."

"But what will you do?"

He didn't follow.

"What'll you do after that?" She towered above him, her cheeks flushed
with intellectual passion. "In Parliament, I mean. There's so much to
do. Will it be housing? If it was me it would be housing. But what are
you going to do?"

"I'll sit as a Liberal," he said, with an air of quiet competence.
"We've always been Liberals."

"Ach! _Liberal!_" she said, with the spirit of one who had cried, "Keep
the Liberal out!" at a Leith polling-booth and had been haled backwards
by the hair from the person of Mr. Winston Churchill. Mr. Philip laughed
again and felt a kind of glow. He never could get over a feeling that to
discover a woman excited about an intellectual thing was like coming on
her bathing; her cast-off femininity affected him as a heap of her
clothes on the beach might have done. But the flash in her eyes died to
the homelier fires of a more personal quarrel. "Is yon Mrs. Powell's
heavy feet coming up the stair?" she enquired.