“We’ve got to have the Duc de Mersch now,” he answered, “De Mersch as State Founder—­written as large as you can—­all across the page.  The moment’s come and we’ve got to rope it in, that’s all.  I’ve been middling good to you....  You understand....”

He began to explain in his dark sentences.  The time had come for an energetically engineered boom in de Mersch—­a boom all along the line.  And I was to commence the campaign.  Fox had been good to me and I was to repay him.  I listened in a sort of apathetic indifference.

“Oh, very well,” I said.  I was subconsciously aware that, as far as I was concerned, the determining factor of the situation was the announcement that de Mersch was to be in Paris.  If he had been in his own particular grand duchy I wouldn’t have gone after him.  For a moment I thought of the interview as taking place in London.  But Fox—­ostensibly, at least—­wasn’t even aware of de Mersch’s visit; spoke of him as being in Paris—­in a flat in which he was accustomed to interview the continental financiers who took up so much of his time.

I realised that I wanted to go to Paris because she was there.  She had said that she was going to Paris on the morrow of yesterday.  The name was pleasant to me, and it turned the scale.

Fox’s eyes remained upon my face.

“Do you good, eh?” he dimly interpreted my thoughts.  “A run over.  I thought you’d like it and, look here, Polehampton’s taken over the Bi-Monthly; wants to get new blood into it, see?  He’d take something.  I’ve been talking to him—­a short series....  ‘Aspects.’  That sort of thing.”  I tried to work myself into some sort of enthusiasm of gratitude.  I knew that Fox had spoken well of me to Polehampton—­as a sort of set off.

“You go and see Mr. P.,” he confirmed; “it’s really all arranged.  And then get off to Paris as fast as you can and have a good time.”

“Have I been unusually cranky lately?” I asked.

“Oh, you’ve been a little off the hooks, I thought, for the last week or so.”

He took up a large bottle of white mucilage, and I accepted it as a sign of dismissal.  I was touched by his solicitude for my health.  It always did touch me, and I found myself unusually broad-minded in thought as I went down the terra-cotta front steps into the streets.  For all his frank vulgarity, for all his shirt-sleeves—­I somehow regarded that habit of his as the final mark of the Beast—­and the Louis Quinze accessories, I felt a warm good-feeling for the little man.

I made haste to see Polehampton, to beard him in a sort of den that contained a number of shelves of books selected for their glittering back decoration.  They gave the impression that Mr. Polehampton wished to suggest to his visitors the fitness and propriety of clothing their walls with the same gilt cloth.  They gave that idea, but I think that, actually, Mr. Polehampton took an aesthetic delight in the gilding.