She left Churchill pacing nervously up and down.

“I could go on with something else, if you like,” I said.

“But I don’t like,” he said, energetically; “I’d much rather not see the man.  You know the sort of person he is.”

“Why, no,” I answered, “I never studied the Almanac de Gotha.”

“Oh, I forgot,” he said.  He seemed vexed with himself.

Churchill’s dinners were frequently rather trying to me.  Personages of enormous importance used to drop in—­and reveal themselves as rather asinine.  At the best of times they sat dimly opposite to me, discomposed me, and disappeared.  Sometimes they stared me down.  That night there were two of them.

Gurnard I had heard of.  One can’t help hearing of a Chancellor of the Exchequer.  The books of reference said that he was the son of one William Gurnard, Esq., of Grimsby; but I remember that once in my club a man who professed to know everything, assured me that W. Gurnard, Esq. (whom he had described as a fish salesman), was only an adoptive father.  His rapid rise seemed to me inexplicable till the same man accounted for it with a shrug:  “When a man of such ability believes in nothing, and sticks at nothing, there’s no saying how far he may go.  He has kicked away every ladder.  He doesn’t mean to come down.”

This, no doubt, explained much; but not everything in his fabulous career.  His adherents called him an inspired statesman; his enemies set him down a mere politician.  He was a man of forty-five, thin, slightly bald, and with an icy assurance of manner.  He was indifferent to attacks upon his character, but crushed mercilessly every one who menaced his position.  He stood alone, and a little mysterious; his own party was afraid of him.

Gurnard was quite hidden from me by table ornaments; the Duc de Mersch glowed with light and talked voluminously, as if he had for years and years been starved of human society.  He glowed all over, it seemed to me.  He had a glorious beard, that let one see very little of his florid face and took the edge away from an almost non-existent forehead and depressingly wrinkled eyelids.  He spoke excellent English, rather slowly, as if he were forever replying to toasts to his health.  It struck me that he seemed to treat Churchill in nuances as an inferior, whilst for the invisible Gurnard, he reserved an attitude of nervous self-assertion.  He had apparently come to dilate on the Systeme Groenlandais, and he dilated.  Some mistaken persons had insinuated that the Systeme was neither more nor less than a corporate exploitation of unhappy Esquimaux.  De Mersch emphatically declared that those mistaken people were mistaken, declared it with official finality.  The Esquimaux were not unhappy.  I paid attention to my dinner, and let the discourse on the affairs of the Hyperborean Protectorate lapse into an unheeded murmur.  I tried to be the simple amanuensis at the feast.