Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 10, 2025
"You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through hers, and felt someone urging me to the French windows that gave on the balcony. "If you think " she said, yielding gladly "Oh, RATHER!" said I. The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief in my oratorical powers, was sticking his face up to mine. "It's all over," he said, "and you've won.
She explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, she explained us to the people who came to her dinners and afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and expectation, and the proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural development in the world.
Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a desultory friendship with Isabel.
The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the Great Western and the North Western railways.
How it impressed the electorate we did not know, but that it impressed the electorate profoundly there can be no disputing. Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we came back it must have been Saturday triumphant but very tired, to our house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intimations that the victory of our party was likely to be a sweeping one.
A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr. Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead Division was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle.
There was a frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made Bromstead the place it is.
"Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the square swept a wildfire of booting and bawling. It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a speech. I glanced sideways and saw the Mayor of Kinghamstead speaking behind his hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill caught my eye. "What do they want?" I asked. "Eh?" "What do they want?"
I realised then, as a man comes to do, how much one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election I was a man taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a young candidate, a party unit, led about the constituency, told to do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-Imperialist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach.
She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had I known a girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!
Word Of The Day
Others Looking