She talked brightly of the small happenings of their day-by-day political life and bridged over the moments of awkwardness before general conversation assumed its normal swing.

Dartrey encouraged Miller to talk and they all listened while he spoke of the mammoth trades unions of the north, where his hold upon the people was greatest.

He spoke still bitterly of the war, from the moral effect of which, he argued, the working man had never wholly recovered.

Tallente listened a little grimly.
"The fervour of self-sacrifice and so-called patriotism which some of the proletariat undoubtedly felt at the outbreak of the war," Miller argued, "was only an incidental, a purely passing sensation compared to the idle and greedy inertia which followed it.

The war lost," he went on, "might have acted as a lash upon the torpor of many of these men.
Won, it created a wave of immorality and extravagance from which they had never recovered.