JESSE COLLINGS.  I don’t—­I can’t think you are right, Chamberlain.  You are forgetting things.

CHAMBERLAIN.  No—­I’ve had difficulty about thinking so myself; but, it has come to me.

(And so he sits and meditates over the point in his career where as a business man he first jailed.  Presently he resumes:)

When two men, whose qualifications I used rather to despise, beat me at business, Collings—­it was a facer!

JESSE COLLINGS.  Bannerman; and—­the other?

CHAMBERLAIN.  Comes to see me to-day.  But it won’t be a business meeting. 
He’ll not say anything about it—­if he can help.

JESSE COLLINGS.  And you?

CHAMBERLAIN.  Perhaps I shall succumb to his charm.  I’ve done so before now.

JESSE COLLINGS.  Have you and he—­had words ever?

CHAMBERLAIN.  Differences of opinion, of course.  “Words”?  How should we?  He was always so wonderfully accommodating, so polite, so apologetic even.  Nobody ever had a finer contempt for his party than he—­not even old Dizzy, or Salisbury, or Churchill.  So he could always say the handsome thing to one—­behind its back—­even when he was making burnt-offerings to its prejudices.

JESSE COLLINGS.  And when you left him?

CHAMBERLAIN.  When I left him he did the thing beautifully.  So genuinely sorry to lose me; so sure of having me with him again, before long.  How could I have gone out and worked against him after that?  But it’s what—­as a business politician—­I ought to have done.

JESSE COLLINGS.  If you had—­should we have won, straight away?

CHAMBERLAIN.  We should have won the party, and the party-machine too.  For the rest it wouldn’t have mattered waiting a year or two.  Yes, we should have won.  But here’s this, Collings:  we should have won then; we shan’t win now.  Times are changing:  the time for it is over.  Something else is coming along—­what, I don’t know.  My old fox-scent has gone:  wind’s against me.  The Colonies are growing up too fast.  They won’t separate, but they mean to stand on their own feet all the same:  in their own way—­not mine.  We ought to have got them when they were a bit younger:  we could have done it then.  Once it flattered them to be called “Dominions “; now they are going to be “Sovereign States.”  And he—­he doesn’t mind.  He is never for big constructive ideas—­only for contrivances:  takes things as they come, makes the best of them—­philosophically—­and gets round them; and sometimes does it brilliantly.

JESSE COLLINGS.  What will he talk about?

CHAMBERLAIN.  Anything that comes into his head:  the weather, the garden, the greenhouses, the theatres.  He’ll tell me, perhaps, of a book or two that I ought to read, that he hasn’t had time for.  He’ll say, as you said, that I’m looking better than he expected.  He’ll say something handsome about Austen—­quite genuinely meaning it.  Then he’ll say he’s afraid of tiring me; then he’ll go....  Have you noticed how he shakes hands?  He hasn’t much of a hand—­not a real hand—­but he does it, like everything else, charmingly.