He had recovered long ago from that remarkable conception of an
active if dishonest political career as a means of escaping Mrs.
Skelmersdale and all that Mrs. Skelmersdale symbolized. That would
be just louting from one bad thing to another. He had to settle
Mrs. Skelmersdale clean and right, and he had to do as exquisitely
right in politics as he could devise. If the public life of the
country had got itself into a stupid antagonism of two undesirable
things, the only course for a sane man of honour was to stand out
from the parties and try and get them back to sound issues again.
There must be endless people of a mind with himself in this matter.
And even if there were not, if he was the only man in the world, he
still had to follow his lights and do the right. And his business
was to find out the right. . . .
He came back from these imaginative excursions into contemporary
politics with one idea confirmed in his mind, an idea that had been
indeed already in his mind during his Cambridge days. This was the
idea of working out for himself, thoroughly and completely, a
political scheme, a theory of his work and duty in the world, a plan
of the world's future that should give a rule for his life.
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