Explore "The Room on the Fourth Floor" by Ralph Straus on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
John Chester ought never to have gone in for politics. I am quite certain that he should have sat down at a desk and written romances, and become a "best-seller", and built himself a marble house, and married a wife, and hired a press-agent. Instead, as everybody knows, he elected to be returned to Parliament twenty-five years ago, and there he has remained ever since, always upon the fringe of the Government, though never actually entering those extraordinary precincts.
Probably succeeding Premiers have considered that Chester's duties as a raconteur at fashionable dinner-tables must for ever preclude him from undertaking anything else, though, I dare say, he has refused office on his own account. He is just the kind of man to do such a thing--a man too keen about other people to look properly after his own interests.