He looked at Lorne
Murchison, too, and listened to him, with steady critical
attention. Lorne seemed in a way to sum it all up in his
person, all the better opportunity a man had out there;
and he handled large matters of the future with a confidence
and a grip that quickened the circulation. Hesketh's open
mind gradually became filled with the imperial view as
he had the capacity to take it; and we need not be
surprised if Lorne Murchison, gazing in the same direction,
supposed that they saw the same thing.
Hesketh confessed, declared, that Murchison had brought
him round; and Lorne surveyed this achievement with a
thrill of the happiest triumph. Hesketh stood, to him,
a product of that best which he was so occupied in admiring
and pursuing. Perhaps he more properly represented the
second best; but we must allow something for the confusion
of early impressions. Hesketh had lived always in the
presence of ideals disengaged in England as nowhere else
in the world; in Oxford, Lorne knew, they clustered thick.
There is no doubt that his manners were good, and his
ideas unimpeachable in the letter; the young Canadian
read the rest into him and loved him for what he might
have been.
"As an Englishman," said Hesketh one evening as they
walked together back from the Chafes' along Knightsbridge,
talking of the policy urged by the Colonial representatives
at the last Conference, "I could wish the idea were more
our own--that we were pressing it on the colonies instead
of the colonies pressing it on us.
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