nisters.

The cabinet ministers were rather older than he had expected to find
them. The Prime Minister no longer looked like a boy, though he
still looked a little like a baby. But it was one of those old and
venerable babies, and the baby had soft gray hair. Everything about
him was soft, to his speech and his way of walking; but over and
above that his chief function seemed to be sleep. People left alone
with him got so used to his eyes being closed that they were almost
startled when they realized in the stillness that the eyes were wide
open, and even watching. One thing at least would always make the
old gentleman open his eyes. The one thing he really cared for in
this world was his hobby of armored weapons, especially Eastern
weapons, and he would talk for hours about Damascus blades and Arab
swordmanship. Lord James Herries, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
was a short, dark, sturdy man with a very sallow face and a very
sullen manner, which contrasted with the gorgeous flower in his
buttonhole and his festive trick of being always slightly
overdressed. It was something of a euphemism to call him a
well-known man about town. There was perhaps more mystery in the
question of how a man who lived for pleasure seemed to get so little
pleasure out of it. Sir David Archer, the Foreign Secretary, was the
only one of them who was a self-made man, and the only one of them
who looked like an aristocrat. He was tall and thin and very
handsome, with a grizzled beard; his gray hair was very curly, and
even rose in front in two rebellious ringlets that seemed to the
fanciful to tremble like the antennae of some giant insect, or to
stir sympathetically with the restless tufted eyebrows over his
rather haggard eyes. For the Foreign Secretary made no secret of his
somewhat nervous condition, whatever might be the cause of it.

"Do you know that mood when one could scream because a mat is
crooked?" he said to March, as they walked up and down in the back
garden below the line of dingy statues. "Women get into it when
they've worked too hard; and I've been working pretty hard lately,
of course. It drives me mad when Herries will wear his hat a little
crooked--habit of looking like a gay dog. Sometime I swear I'll
knock it off. That statue of Britannia over there isn't quite
straight; it sticks forward a bit as if the lady were going to
topple over. The damned thing is that it doesn't topple over and be
done with it. See, it's