r than he had ever seemed before--as if I had
begun to realise that the world had moved on.

He said, languidly--almost protestingly, "What am I to do about the Duc
de Mersch?"

Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost apprehensively, toward him. She
uttered my name and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance--a
start that meant, "Why wasn't I warned before?" This irritated me; I
knew well enough what were his relations with de Mersch, and the man
took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose. His attitudes were rather
grotesque, of the sort that would pass in a person of his eminence. He
stuck his eye-glasses on the end of his nose, looked at me
short-sightedly, took them off and looked again. He had the air of
looking down from an immense height--of needing a telescope.

"Oh, ah ... Mrs. Granger's son, I presume.... I wasn't aware...." The
hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we never should get
anywhere--not for years and years.

"No," I said, rather brusquely, "I'm only from the _Hour_."

He thought me one of Fox's messengers then, said that Fox might have
written: "Have saved you the trouble, I mean ... or...."

He had the air of wishing to be amiable, of wishing, even, to please me
by proving that he was aware of my identity.

"Oh," I said, a little loftily, "I haven't any message, I've only come
to interview you." An expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his
face.

"To...." he began, "but I've never allowed--" He recovered himself
sharply, and set the glasses vigorously on his nose; at last he had
found the right track. "Oh, I remember now," he said, "I hadn't looked
at it in that way."

The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way,
furiously angry. I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a
puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot. And he gave
himself these airs of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was
clean-handed in the matter; I hadn't any axe to grind.

"Ah, yes," he said, hastily, "you are to draw my portrait--as Fox put
it. He sent me your Jenkins sketch. I read it--it struck a very nice
note. And so--." He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his
knees on a level with his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find
the process a bore.

"Not more for me than for you," he answered, seriously--"one has to do
these things."

"Why, yes," I echoed, "one has to do these things." It struck me that he
regretted it--regre