“Oh, that will be all right,” Fox comforted.  “I dare say Callan has rather sickened you of the job; particularly if you ain’t used to it.  But you won’t find the others as trying.  There’s Churchill now, he’s your next.  You’ll have to mind him.  You’ll find him a decent chap.  Not a bit of side on him.”

“What Churchill?” I asked.

“The Foreign Minister.”

“The devil,” I said.

“Oh, you’ll find him all right,” Fox reassured; “you’re to go down to his place to-morrow.  It’s all arranged.  Here we are.  Hop out.”  He suited his own action to his words and ran nimbly up the new terra-cotta steps of the Hour’s home.  He left me to pay the cabman.

When I rejoined him he was giving directions to an invisible somebody through folding doors.

“Come along,” he said, breathlessly.  “Can’t see him,” he added to a little boy, who held a card in his hands.  “Tell him to go to Mr. Evans.  One’s life isn’t one’s own here,” he went on, when he had reached his own room.

It was a palatial apartment furnished in white and gold—­Louis Quinze, or something of the sort—­with very new decorations after Watteau covering the walls.  The process of disfiguration, however, had already begun.  A roll desk of the least possible Louis Quinze order stood in one of the tall windows; the carpet was marked by muddy footprints, and a matchboard screen had been run across one end of the room.

“Hullo, Evans,” Fox shouted across it, “just see that man from Grant’s, will you?  Heard from the Central News yet?”

He was looking through the papers on the desk.

“Not yet, I’ve just rung them up for the fifth time,” the answer came.

“Keep on at it,” Fox exhorted.

“Here’s Churchill’s letter,” he said to me.  “Have an arm-chair; those blasted things are too uncomfortable for anything.  Make yourself comfortable.  I’ll be back in a minute.”

I took an arm-chair and addressed myself to the Foreign Minister’s letter.  It expressed bored tolerance of a potential interviewer, but it seemed to please Fox.  He ran into the room, snatched up a paper from his desk, and ran out again.

“Read Churchill’s letter?” he asked, in passing.  “I’ll tell you all about it in a minute.”  I don’t know what he expected me to do with it—­kiss the postage stamp, perhaps.

At the same time, it was pleasant to sit there idle in the midst of the hurry, the breathlessness.  I seemed to be at last in contact with real life, with the life that matters.  I was somebody, too.  Fox treated me with a kind of deference—­as if I were a great unknown.  His “you literary men” was pleasing.  It was the homage that the pretender pays to the legitimate prince; the recognition due to the real thing from the machine-made imitation; the homage of the builder to the architect.

“Ah, yes,” it seemed to say, “we jobbing men run up our rows and rows of houses; build whole towns and fill the papers for years.  But when we want something special—­something monumental—­we have to come to you.”