It was a curiously empty phrase and his dissatisfaction grew. You said it would all be worth it in the end. Do you remember? And it was, was it not? Worth it? Eleanor’s words over breakfast. They had unsettled him. It unsettled him now that Verity had uttered almost the same thought. Were they so much alike then, his wife and his mistress? Must he be, forever, justifying his work to them? Did they not see that the work was noble, it was honourable, that it was, in fact, an end in itself?

But what came into his head was himself returning home in a cab a year ago, the evening the Federation vote had been lost—irrevocably, it had seemed at the time—and entering Eleanor’s room to inform her. She had been lying in bed, quite pale and stricken, though her face had had no expression (how could that be, he wondered?). The doctor had just left and the look she had given him as he delivered his news had told him she understood. Their child was lost before it was even born and his despair at the Federation was how he would get through it. It was how all men got through such moments. He did not know how women got through them. He suspected women, in this way, were stronger than men.

But Verity was watching him. He stared at her and for a moment had no idea who she was or why he was here. He made himself smile.

‘Naturally, my work is worth it. It is the creation of a nation. You are new to our shores, Verity, you cannot be expected to fully appreciate the importance of our task.’

‘Oh, but I do,’ she replied. ‘Men in parliament are always engaged in great and important tasks, and if this particular task may result in the creation of a new parliament, even greater and more important than the current one, then of course it must be worth all the effort you are putting into it.’

He smiled at her, for she had missed his point—entirely and charmingly. She was young—twenty-two—and he was, therefore, more than twenty years her senior, which was as it ought to be. (There was something distinctly unbalanced about a man’s wife being almost the same age as himself. It was unnatural. He had not considered it so when he and Eleanor had met and were first married, but now it struck him forcibly whenever he was with her.) So he smiled at Verity and forgave her ignorance, forgave the secretive appointment.