“You must be the little girl that I remember,” he said.  He had known my parents ages ago.  That, indeed, was how I came to know him; I wouldn’t have chosen him for a friend.  “I thought Granger said you were dead ... but one gets confused....”

“Oh, we see very little of each other,” she answered.  “Arthur might have said I was dead—­he’s capable of anything, you know.”  She spoke with an assumption of sisterly indifference that was absolutely striking.  I began to think she must be an actress of genius, she did it so well.  She was the sister who had remained within the pale; I, the rapscallion of a brother whose vagaries were trying to his relations.  That was the note she struck, and she maintained it.  I didn’t know what the deuce she was driving at, and I didn’t care.  These scenes with a touch of madness appealed to me.  I was going to live, and here, apparently, was a woman ready to my hand.  Besides, she was making a fool of Callan, and that pleased me.  His patronising manners had irritated me.

I assisted rather silently.  They began to talk of mutual acquaintances—­as one talks.  They both seemed to know everyone in this world.  She gave herself the airs of being quite in the inner ring; alleged familiarity with quite impossible persons, with my portentous aunt, with Cabinet Ministers—­that sort of people.  They talked about them—­she, as if she lived among them; he, as if he tried very hard to live up to them.

She affected reverence for his person, plied him with compliments that he swallowed raw—­horribly raw.  It made me shudder a little; it was tragic to see the little great man confronted with that woman.  It shocked me to think that, really, I must appear much like him—­must have looked like that yesterday.  He was a little uneasy, I thought, made little confidences as if in spite of himself; little confidences about the Hour, the new paper for which I was engaged.  It seemed to be run by a small gang with quite a number of assorted axes to grind.  There was some foreign financier—­a person of position whom she knew (a noble man in the best sense, Callan said); there was some politician (she knew him too, and he was equally excellent, so Callan said), Mr. Churchill himself, an artist or so, an actor or so—­and Callan.  They all wanted a little backing, so it seemed.  Callan, of course, put it in another way.  The Great—­Moral—­Purpose turned up, I don’t know why.  He could not think he was taking me in and she obviously knew more about the people concerned than he did.  But there it was, looming large, and quite as farcical as all the rest of it.  The foreign financier—­they called him the Duc de Mersch—­was by way of being a philanthropist on megalomaniac lines.  For some international reason he had been allowed to possess himself of the pleasant land of Greenland.  There was gold in it and train-oil in it and other things that paid—­but the Duc de Mersch was not thinking of that.  He was first and foremost