ce. I wished so much that the perennial
hopefulness of the man should at last escape deferring and I was afraid
that Churchill would chill before Jenkins had time to thaw. But, as I
have said, I think Churchill understood. He smiled his kindly,
short-sighted smile over canvas after canvas, praised the right thing in
each, remembered having seen this and that in such and such a year, and
Jenkins thawed.

He happened to leave the room--to fetch some studies, to hurry up the
tea or for some such reason. Bereft of his presence the place suddenly
grew ghostly. It was as if the sun had died in the sky and left us in
that nether world where dead, buried pasts live in a grey, shadowless
light. Jenkins' palette glowed from above a medley of stained rags on
his open colour table. The rush-bottom of his chair resembled a
wind-torn thatch.

"One can draw morals from a life like that," I said suddenly. I was
thinking rather of Jenkins than of the man I was talking to.

"Why, yes," he said, absently, "I suppose there are men who haven't the
knack of getting on."

"It's more than a knack," I said, with unnecessary bitterness. "It's a
temperament."

"I think it's a habit, too. It may be acquired, mayn't it?"

"No, no," I fulminated, "it's precisely because it can't be acquired
that the best men--the men like ..." I stopped suddenly, impressed by
the idea that the thing was out of tone. I had to assert myself more
than I liked in talking to Churchill. Otherwise I should have
disappeared. A word from him had the weight of three kingdoms and
several colonies behind it, and I was forced to get that out of my head
by making conversation a mere matter of temperament. In that I was the
stronger. If I wanted to say a thing, I said it; but he was hampered by
a judicial mind. It seemed, too, that he liked a dictatorial
interlocutor, else he would hardly have brought himself into contact
with me again. Perhaps it was new to him. My eye fell upon a couple of
masks, hanging one on each side of the fireplace. The room was full of a
profusion of little casts, thick with dust upon the shoulders, the hair,
the eyelids, on every part that projected outward.

"By-the-bye," I said, "that's a death-mask of Cromwell."

"Ah!" he answered, "I knew there _was_...."

He moved very slowly toward it, rather as if he did not wish to bring it
within his field of view. He stopped before reaching it and pivotted
slowly to face me.

"About my book," he op