She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the
Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very
rich-looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of
gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned these
golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had been escapes
me,--some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I remember
I didn't speak for some moments. I went across to the window and pulled
the blind aside, and looked out upon the railed garden of the square,
with its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly in
the light of the big electric standard in the corner.
“Margaret,” I said, “I think I shall break with the party.”
She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
“I was afraid you meant to do that,” she said.
“I'm out of touch,” I explained. “Altogether.”
“Oh! I know.”
“It places me in a difficult position,” I said.
Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself
in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stoppered
bottles of tinted glass. “I was afraid it was coming to this,” she said.
“In a way,” I said, “we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn't
have gone into Parliament....”
“I don't want considerations like that to affect us,” she interrupted.
There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, lifted
an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
“I wish,” she said, with something like a sob in her voice, “it were
possible that you shouldn't do this.” She stopped abruptly, and I did
not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to
control herself.
“I thought,” she began again, “when you came into Parliament--”
There came another silence. “It's all gone so differently,” she said.
“Everything has gone so differently.”
I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the Kinghampstead
election, and for the first time I realised just how perplexing and
disappointing my subsequent career must have been to her.
“I'm not doing this without consideration,” I said.
“I know,” she said, in a voice of despair, “I've seen it coming. But--I
still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go over.”
“My ideas have changed and developed,” I said.