“You know pretty well how much I’ve done,” he continued.  “I’ve got a good deal of material together and a good deal of the actual writing is done.  But there is ever so much still to do.  It’s getting beyond me, as I said just now.”

I looked at him again, rather incredulously.  He stood before me, a thin parallelogram of black with a mosaic of white about the throat.  The slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost impossibly real in his abstracted earnestness.  He so much meant what he said that he ignored what his hands were doing, or his body or his head.  He had taken a very small, very dusty book out of a little shelf beside him, and was absently turning over the rusty leaves, while he talked with his head bent over it.  What was I to him, or he to me?

“I could give my Saturday afternoons to it,” he was saying, “whenever you could come down.”

“It’s immensely kind of you,” I began.

“Not at all, not at all,” he waived.  “I’ve set my heart on doing it and, unless you help me, I don’t suppose I ever shall get it done.”

“But there are hundreds of others,” I said.

“There may be,” he said, “there may be.  But I have not come across them.”

I was beset by a sudden emotion of blind candour.

“Oh, nonsense, nonsense,” I said.  “Don’t you see that you are offering me the chance of a lifetime?”

Churchill laughed.

“After all, one cannot refuse to take what offers,” he said.  “Besides, your right man to do the work might not suit me as a collaborator.”

“It’s very tempting,” I said.

“Why, then, succumb,” he smiled.

I could not find arguments against him, and I succumbed as Jenkins re-entered the room.

CHAPTER EIGHT

After that I began to live, as one lives; and for forty-nine weeks.  I know it was forty-nine, because I got fifty-two atmospheres in all; Callan’s and Churchill’s, and those forty-nine and the last one that finished the job and the year of it.  It was amusing work in its way; people mostly preferred to have their atmospheres taken at their country houses—­it showed that they had them, I suppose.  Thus I spent a couple of days out of every week in agreeable resorts, and people were very nice to me—­it was part of the game.

So I had a pretty good time for a year and enjoyed it, probably because I had had a pretty bad one for several years.  I filled in the rest of my weeks by helping Fox and collaborating with Mr. Churchill and adoring Mrs. Hartly at odd moments.  I used to hang about the office of the Hour on the chance of snapping up a blank three lines fit for a subtle puff of her.  Sometimes they were too hurried to be subtle, and then Mrs. Hartly was really pleased.

I never understood her in the least, and I very much doubt whether she ever understood a word I said.  I imagine that I must have talked to her about her art or her mission—­things obviously as strange to her as to the excellent Hartly himself.  I suppose she hadn’t any art; I am certain she hadn’t any mission, except to be adored.  She walked about the stage and one adored her, just as she sat about her flat and was adored, and there the matter ended.