“I always was a one for cheerful colours,” explained Mrs. Phillips. “But you’re surely not suggesting any other kind of Press, at this period of the world’s history?” exclaimed Joan.!

“Why, that’s a sign of breeding, that is, Missie,” the man had explained. “It’s the classy ones that are always the worst.” “She was so much better last week,” he explained. “But it never lasts.”

He did not think the candidature need be confined to Dukes, though he had no objection to a worthy Duke. He meant any really great man who would help her and whom she could help. “But perhaps you’ve changed your mind,” he said. “It isn’t quite as pretty as it’s painted.” “It doesn’t read quite the same,” he answered. “Phillips goes home under the impression that he has made a great success and has roused the country. He and millions of other readers learn from the next morning’s headlines that it was ‘A Tame Speech’ that he made. What sounded to him ‘Loud Cheers’ have sunk to mild ‘Hear, Hears.’ That five minutes’ hurricane of applause, during which wildly excited men and women leapt upon the benches and roared themselves hoarse, and which he felt had settled the whole question, he searches for in vain. A few silly interjections, probably pre-arranged by Carleton’s young lions, become ‘renewed interruptions.’ The report is strictly truthful; but the impression produced is that Robert Phillips has failed to carry even his own people with him. And then follow leaders in fourteen widely-circulated Dailies, stretching from the Clyde to the Severn, foretelling how Mr. Robert Phillips could regain his waning popularity by the simple process of adopting Tariff Reform: or whatever the pet panacea of Carleton and Co. may, at the moment, happen to be.”