In his slow commercial English he apologised for having kept me waiting; he had been taking the air of this fine morning, he said.  He mumbled the words with his eyes on my waistcoat, with an air that accorded rather ill with the semblance of portentous probity that his beard conferred on him.  But he set an eye-glass in his left eye immediately afterward, and looked straight at me as if in challenge.  With a smiling “Don’t mention,” I tried to demonstrate that I met him half way.

“You want to interview me,” he said, blandly.  “I am only too pleased.  I suppose it is about my Arctic schemes that you wish to know.  I will do what I can to inform you.  You perhaps remember what I said when I had the pleasure of meeting you at the house of the Right Honourable Mr. Churchill.  It has been the dream of my life to leave behind me a happy and contented State—­as much as laws and organisation can make one.  This is what I should most like the English to know of me.”  He was a dull talker.  I supposed that philanthropists and state founders kept their best faculties for their higher pursuits.  I imagined the low, receding forehead and the pink-nailed, fleshy hands to belong to a new Solon, a latter-day AEneas.  I tried to work myself into the properly enthusiastic frame of mind.  After all, it was a great work that he had undertaken.  I was too much given to dwell upon intellectual gifts.  These the Duc seemed to lack.  I credited him with having let them be merged in his one noble idea.

He furnished me with statistics.  They had laid down so many miles of railways, used so many engines of British construction.  They had taught the natives to use and to value sewing-machines and European costumes.  So many hundred of English younger sons had gone to make their fortunes and, incidentally, to enlighten the Esquimaux—­so many hundreds of French, of Germans, Greeks, Russians.  All these lived and moved in harmony, employed, happy, free labourers, protected by the most rigid laws.  Man-eating, fetich-worship, slavery had been abolished, stamped out.  The great international society for the preservation of Polar freedom watched over all, suggested new laws, modified the old.  The country was unhealthy, but not to men of clean lives—­hominibus bonae voluntatis.  It asked for no others.

“I have had to endure much misrepresentation.  I have been called names,” the Duc said.

The figure of the lady danced before my eyes, lithe, supple—­a statue endued with the motion of a serpent.  I seemed to see her sculptured white hand pointing to the closed door.

“Ah, yes,” I said, “but one knows the people that call you names.”

“Well, then,” he answered, “it is your task to make them know the truth.  Your nation has so much power.  If it will only realise.”

“I will do my best,” I said.