talking about.

He said, "_I'm_ talking about the European conflagration. What are you?"

He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of
nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days. It was the
thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago--didn't I remember?
(Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.)
Well then, here it was. And it had come, by God, at the very date he had
given it.

I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was
deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil
triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the
European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right
would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state
of mind. There _was_ a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively
shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it
was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw
himself--there's no doubt that already he did see himself--figuring.

I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn't
suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.

"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging--in the
very thick."

From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg--and he gave them
twenty-four hours--we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of
honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us,
I _think_--but I do not like to say positively that he gave us--three
days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.

What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had
foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have
seen himself there, in the thick--blazing away in the very middle of the
conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that _he_ should have to
do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of
Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in
Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he
wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.

And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like
that was the sweat that had broken out on it.

Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all
about it. He had gone up--he supposed I knew that?--to offer his servi