"The offer from you," he said, "is as
high-minded, as generous, and as honourable as its acceptance by me
would be mean-spirited, vile, and ignoble. But whether I fail or
whether I succeed, you shall see me before the winter is over."
CHAPTER L
Again Successful
Phineas also said a word of farewell to Violet before he left
Matching, but there was nothing peculiar in her little speech to him,
or in his to her. "Of course we shall see each other in London. Don't
talk of not being in the House. Of course you will be in the House."
Then Phineas had shaken his head and smiled. Where was he to find
a requisite number of householders prepared to return him? But as
he went up to London he told himself that the air of the House of
Commons was now the very breath of his nostrils. Life to him without
it would be no life. To have come within the reach of the good things
of political life, to have made his mark so as to have almost insured
future success, to have been the petted young official aspirant of
the day,--and then to sink down into the miserable platitudes of
private life, to undergo daily attendance in law-courts without
a brief, to listen to men who had come to be much below him in
estimation and social intercourse, to sit in a wretched chamber up
three pairs of stairs at Lincoln's Inn, whereas he was now at this
moment provided with a gorgeous apartment looking out into the Park
from the Colonial Office in Downing Street, to be attended by a
mongrel between a clerk and an errand boy at 17s.
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