He clung to her, as a troubled child might, with his arms clasped round her, and his head against her breast. And a mist rose up before her, and strange, commanding voices seemed calling to her. “Ask Phillips to come and see me,” he said. “I can be of more help, if I know exactly his views.”!

“Carleton will want him to make his food policy include Tariff Reform,” he said. “If he prove pliable, and is willing to throw over his free trade principles, all well and good.” She glanced through the open door to where the poor, broken fellows she always thought of as “her boys” lay so patient, and then held out her hand to him with a smile, though the tears were in her eyes.

“It ought to be included in every woman’s education,” Madge continued. “It is reserved for spinsters of over forty-five. Susan Fleming wrote an article upon it for the Teacher’s Friend; and spent an afternoon and evening there. A month later she married a grocer with five children. The only sound suggestion for avoiding trouble that I ever came across was in a burlesque of the Blue Bird. You remember the scene where the spirits of the children are waiting to go down to earth and be made into babies? Someone had stuck up a notice at the entrance to the gangway: ‘Don’t get born. It only means worry.’” “Thanks,” said Mrs. Phillips. “You see, as the wife of a public man, I get so little time for study.” “Can you see him bustling up?” he answered with a laugh; “organizing himself into a body, and working the thing out from the point of view of the public weal? I’ll tell you what nine-tenths of him would do: grow just as much or little as suited his own purposes; and then go to sleep. And Protection would be his security against ever being awakened.”