all wait until the trembling big-wigs have stuttered their
speeches out, and then I'm going to sail down the centre aisle and
listen to Churchill with visible signs of approval. It won't do much
to-day, but there was a time when it would have changed the course of an
election.... Ah, there's Effie's young man. It's time."

She rose and marched, with the air of going to a last sacrifice, across
the deserted sward toward a young man who was passing under the calico
flag of the gateway.

"It's all right, Willoughby," she said, as we drew level, "I've found
someone else to face the music with me; you can go back to Effie." A
bronzed and grateful young man murmured thanks to me.

"It's an awful relief, Granger," he said; "can't think how you can do
it. I'm hooked, but you...."

"He's the better man," his mother-in-law-elect said, over her shoulder.
She sailed slowly up the aisle beside me, an almost heroic figure of a
matron. "Splendidly timed, you see," she said, "do you observe my
husband's embarrassment?"

It was splendid to see Churchill again, standing there negligently, with
the diffidence of a boy amid the bustle of applause. I understood
suddenly why I loved him so, this tall, gray man with the delicate,
almost grotesque, mannerisms. He appealed to me by sheer force of
picturesqueness, appealed as some forgotten mediaeval city might. I was
concerned for him as for some such dying place, standing above the
level plains; I was jealous lest it should lose one jot of its glory, of
its renown. He advocated his saner policy before all those people; stood
up there and spoke gently, persuasively, without any stress of emotion,
without more movement than an occasional flutter of the glasses he held
in his hand. One would never have recognised that the thing was a
fighting speech but for the occasional shiver of his audience. They were
thinking of their Slingsbys; he affecting, insouciantly, to treat them
as rational people.

It was extraordinary to sit there shut in by that wall of people all of
one type, of one idea; the idea of getting back; all conscious that a
force of which they knew nothing was dragging them forward over the edge
of a glacier, into a crevasse. They wanted to get back, were struggling,
panting even--as a nation pants--to get back by their own way that they
understood and saw; were hauling, and hauling desperately, at the
weighted rope that was dragging them forward. Churchill stood up there
and re