A side door, behind Miss Churchill, opened gently.  There was something very characteristic in the tentative manner of its coming ajar.  It seemed to say:  “Why any noisy vigour?” It seemed to be propelled by a contemplative person with many things on his mind.  A tall, grey man in the doorway leaned the greater part of his weight on the arm that was stretched down to the handle.  He was looking thoughtfully at a letter that he held in his other hand.  A face familiar enough in caricatures suddenly grew real to me—­more real than the face of one’s nearest friends, yet older than one had any wish to expect.  It was as if I had gazed more intently than usual at the face of a man I saw daily, and had found him older and greyer than he had ever seemed before—­as if I had begun to realise that the world had moved on.

He said, languidly—­almost protestingly, “What am I to do about the Duc de Mersch?”

Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost apprehensively, toward him.  She uttered my name and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance—­a start that meant, “Why wasn’t I warned before?” This irritated me; I knew well enough what were his relations with de Mersch, and the man took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose.  His attitudes were rather grotesque, of the sort that would pass in a person of his eminence.  He stuck his eye-glasses on the end of his nose, looked at me short-sightedly, took them off and looked again.  He had the air of looking down from an immense height—­of needing a telescope.

“Oh, ah ...  Mrs. Granger’s son, I presume....  I wasn’t aware....”  The hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we never should get anywhere—­not for years and years.

“No,” I said, rather brusquely, “I’m only from the Hour.”

He thought me one of Fox’s messengers then, said that Fox might have written:  “Have saved you the trouble, I mean ... or....”

He had the air of wishing to be amiable, of wishing, even, to please me by proving that he was aware of my identity.

“Oh,” I said, a little loftily, “I haven’t any message, I’ve only come to interview you.”  An expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his face.

“To....” he began, “but I’ve never allowed—­” He recovered himself sharply, and set the glasses vigorously on his nose; at last he had found the right track.  “Oh, I remember now,” he said, “I hadn’t looked at it in that way.”

The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way, furiously angry.  I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot.  And he gave himself these airs of enormous distance.  I, at any rate, was clean-handed in the matter; I hadn’t any axe to grind.

“Ah, yes,” he said, hastily, “you are to draw my portrait—­as Fox put it.  He sent me your Jenkins sketch.  I read it—­it struck a very nice note.  And so—.”  He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his knees on a level with his chin.  I muttered that I feared he would find the process a bore.