Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/115

 would go beyond them, with his back to them, away from them into an activity that excluded them, in this man they did not find it so easy to believe.

Harriet, however, said nothing for two days. She was happy in her new house, delighted with the sea and the being alone, she loved her Coo-ee bungalow, and loved making it look nice. She loved having Lovat alone with her, and all her desires, as it were, in the hollow of her hand. She was bright and affectionate with him. But underneath lurked this chagrin of his wanting to go away from her, for his activity.

"You don't take Callcott and his politics seriously, do you?" she said to him at evening.

"Yes," he said, rather hesitatingly.

"But what does he want?"

"To have another sort of government for the Commonwealth—with a sort of Dictator: not the democratic vote-cadging sort."

"But what does that matter to you?"

"It does matter. If you can start a new life-form."

"You know quite well you say yourself life doesn't start with a form. It starts with a new feeling, and ends with a form."

"I know. But I think there is a new feeling."

"In Callcott?" She had a very sceptical intonation.

"Yes."

"I very much doubt it. He's a returned war hero, and he wants a chance of keeping on being a hero—or something like that."

"But even that is a new feeling," he persisted.

"Yah!" she said, rather wearily sceptical. "I'd rather even believe in William James. There seems to me more real feeling even in him: deeper, at any rate. Your Jacks are shallow really."

"Nay, he seemed a man to me."

"I don't know what you mean by your men. Really, I give it up, I don't know what you do want. You change so. You've always said you despise politics, and yet here you are." She tailed off as if it were hopeless.

"It's not the politics. But it is a new life-form, a new social form. We're pot-bound inside democracy and the democratic feeling."