ith
journalism, with everything. But this little new experience buoyed me
up, set my mind working in less morbid lines. I began to wonder whether
de Mersch would funk, or whether he would take my non-comprehension of
the woman's tirades as a thing assured.

The door at which I had entered, by which she had left, opened.

He must have impressed me in some way or other that evening at the
Churchills. He seemed a very stereotyped image in my memory. He spoke
just as he had spoken, moved his hands just as I expected him to move
them. He called for no modification of my views of his person. As a rule
one classes a man so-and-so at first meeting, modifies the
classification at each subsequent one, and so on. He seemed to be all
affability, of an adipose turn. He had the air of the man of the world
among men of the world; but none of the unconscious reserve of manner
that one expects to find in the temporarily great. He had in its place a
kind of sub-sulkiness, as if he regretted the pedestal from which he had
descended.

In his slow commercial English he apologised for having kept me
waiting; he had been taking the air of this fine morning, he said. He
mumbled the words with his eyes on my waistcoat, with an air that
accorded rather ill with the semblance of portentous probity that his
beard conferred on him. But he set an eye-glass in his left eye
immediately afterward, and looked straight at me as if in challenge.
With a smiling "Don't mention," I tried to demonstrate that I met him
half way.

"You want to interview me," he said, blandly. "I am only too pleased. I
suppose it is about my Arctic schemes that you wish to know. I will do
what I can to inform you. You perhaps remember what I said when I had
the pleasure of meeting you at the house of the Right Honourable Mr.
Churchill. It has been the dream of my life to leave behind me a happy
and contented State--as much as laws and organisation can make one. This
is what I should most like the English to know of me." He was a dull
talker. I supposed that philanthropists and state founders kept their
best faculties for their higher pursuits. I imagined the low, receding
forehead and the pink-nailed, fleshy hands to belong to a new Solon, a
latter-day AEneas. I tried to work myself into the properly enthusiastic
frame of mind. After all, it was a great work that he had undertaken. I
was too much given to dwell upon intellectual gifts. These the Duc
seemed to lack. I credit