young and rising politician. That is to say, he was a pleasant youth,
with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and
enormous estates. In public his appearances were always successful and
his principle was simple enough. When he thought of a joke he made it,
and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that
this was no time for trifling, and was called able. In private, in a
club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly,
like a schoolboy. Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated
them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company
by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal
and a Conservative. He himself was a Conservative, even in private life.
He had a roll of grey hair over the back of his collar, like certain
old-fashioned statesmen, and seen from behind he looked like the man the
empire wants. Seen from the front he looked like a mild, self-indulgent
bachelor, with rooms in the Albany--which he was.

As has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table,
and only twelve members of the club. Thus they could occupy the terrace
in the most luxurious style of all, being ranged along the inner side of
the table, with no one opposite, commanding an uninterrupted view of
the garden, the colours of which were still vivid, though evening was
closing in somewhat luridly for the time of year. The chairman sat in
the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand end
of it. When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it was the
custom (for some unknown reason) for all the fifteen waiters to stand
lining the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fat
proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he
had never heard of them before. But before the first chink of knife and
fork this army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two required
to collect and distribute the plates darting about in deathly silence.
Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared in convulsions of
courtesy long before. It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent,
to say that he ever positively appeared again. But when the important
course, the fish course, was being brought on, there was--how shall I
put it?--a vivid shadow, a projection of his personality, which told
that he was hovering near. The sacred fish course consisted (to the eyes
o