Page:The Tragic Muse (London & New York, Macmillan & Co., 1890), Volume 2.djvu/181

Rh her cold or poor; there was in fact a positive strange heat in them and they struck him rather as grand and high. The fact that she could drop him even while she longed for him—drop him because it was now fixed in her mind that he would not after all serve her determination to be associated, so far as a woman could, with great affairs; that she could postpone, and postpone to an uncertainty, the satisfaction of a gnawing tenderness and judge for the long run—this exhibition of will and courage, of the large plan that possessed her, commanded his admiration on the spot. He paid the heavy penalty of being a man of imagination; he was capable of far excursions of the spirit, disloyalties to habit and even to faith, and open to wondrous communications. He ached for the moment to convince her that he would achieve what he wouldn't, for the vision of his future that she had tried to entertain shone before him as a bribe and a challenge. It seemed to him there was nothing he couldn't fancy enough, to be so fancied by her. Presently he said:

"You want to be sure the man you marry will be prime minister of England. But how can you be sure, with any one?"

"I can be sure some men won't," Mrs. Dallow replied.

"The only safe thing, perhaps, would be to marry Mr. Macgeorge," Nick suggested.

"Possibly not even him."

"You're a prime minister yourself," Nick answered. "To hold fast to you as I hold, to be determined to be of your party—isn't that political enough, since you are the incarnation of politics?"