Phineas also said a word of farewell to Violet before he left Matching, but there was nothing peculiar¹ 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 requisite² 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 nostrils³. 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 ensured future success, to have been the petted young official aspirant⁴ of the day — and then to sink down into the miserable⁵ platitudes⁶ 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 intercourse⁷, to sit in a wretched chamber⁸ 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. 6d. a week instead of by a private secretary who was the son of an earl’s sister, and was petted by countesses’ daughters innumerable — all this would surely break his heart. He could have done it, so he told himself, and could have taken glory in doing it, had not these other things come in his way. But the other things had come. He had run the risk, and had thrown the dice⁹. And how when the game was so nearly won, must it be that everything should be lost at last?

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