and
portals where resplendent footmen stood in waiting, where everything
worked with silent and automatic precision to prepare the way for his
feet, signaling him on from point to point as though he were a sort of
special train for which the line had been expressly cleared and all
other traffic shunted. And yet when he came to the small anteroom which
opened directly into the Council Chamber he felt for all the world like
a timid bather about to unbutton the door of his bathing-machine and
step forth into a strange and hostile element. That moment of
trepidation was one he never could get over,--to face his Council of
Ministers was always a plunge; for here truly he felt out of his depth,
aware that politically he was no swimmer. And now for a couple of hours
he would have to endure while, thoroughly at home in their own element,
twenty stout aquatic athletes tumbled around him.

The door was thrown open; and with an air of calm self-possession he
walked to the head of the table about which his ministers stood waiting.
"Be seated, gentlemen," he said, embracing in a single bow the
obeisances of all; and like slow waves they closed in on him, subsiding
in large curves and soft fawning ripples of hand-rubbing around the
empurpled board at which nominally he was to preside.

When all were seated in order, he signed for the Prime Minister to open
the proceedings, and thereafter had scarcely to speak; for at a King's
Council only general reports were presented, no discussions took place,
no fresh proposals were mooted; and so he sat and heard how this
department or that was extending its beneficent operations, how
statistics were completing to their last decimal places the
prognostications of experts, and how along with these things imports and
exports were balancing, trade declining, education advancing, and
strikes growing every day more formidable and more popular.

It was only this last point that really interested him; for here he
seemed to get a dim rumor of something that was part at least of that
popular will which it was his duty to symbolize and to safeguard. But
these official advisers of his were all for putting strikes down, and
yet while putting them down they seemed to wish to curry favor with the
strikers themselves. For on the one hand there was trade declining, if
the strikes were not put down, to support fresh taxation, on the other
the Labor Party, eighty strong, declining, if the strikes were put down