giant London and the
crowds going perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the urgency
and eventfulness of that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.

It is difficult to think we have left that--for many years if not for
ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the clink and
clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I go in vivid
recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit again at eventful
dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars below the House--dinners
that ended with shrill division bells, I think of huge clubs swarming
and excited by the bulletins of that electoral battle that was for me
the opening opportunity. I see the stencilled names and numbers go up on
the green baize, constituency after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud
shouting....

It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no more.
Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate version of
our story and why I did not take office, and have formed your partial
judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone table, half out of
life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlight
and hung with vine tendrils, with paper before me to distil such wisdom
as I can, as Machiavelli in his exile sought to do, from the things I
have learnt and felt during the career that has ended now in my divorce.

I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my
party. I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red
blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for
ever.

CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER

1

I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was a
little boy in knickerbockers.

When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back to me
the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up to heaven
and its floor covered irregularly with patched and defective oilcloth
and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they call it, of dark stained
wood. Here and there against the wall are trunks and boxes. There are
cupboards on either side of the fireplace and bookshelves with
books above them, and on the wall and rather tattered is a large
yellow-varnished geological map of the South of England. Over the mantel
is a huge lump of white coral rock and several big fossil bones, and
above that hangs the portrait of a brainy gentleman, sliced in hal