The clouds moved imperceptibly, fatefully onward, a streak of lightning tore them apart.  They whirled like tortured smoke and grew suddenly black.  Large spots of rain with jagged edges began to fall on the lead floor of my balcony.

I turned into the twilight of my room and began to write.  I can still feel the tearing of my pen-point on the coarse paper.  It was a hindrance to thought, but my flow of words ignored it, gained impetus from it, as a stream does at the breaking of a dam.

I was writing a paean to a great coloniser.  That sort of thing was in the air then.  I was drawn into it, carried away by my subject.  Perhaps I let it do so because it was so little familiar to my lines of thought.  It was fresh ground and I revelled in it.  I committed myself to that kind of emotional, lyrical outburst that one dislikes so much on re-reading.  I was half conscious of the fact, but I ignored it.

The thunderstorm was over, and there was a moist sparkling freshness in the air when I hurried with my copy to the Hour office in the Avenue de l’Opera.  I wished to be rid of it, to render impossible all chance of revision on the morrow.

I wanted, too, to feel elated; I expected it.  It was a right.  At the office I found the foreign correspondent, a little cosmopolitan Jew whose eyebrows began their growth on the bridge of his nose.  He was effusive and familiar, as the rest of his kind.

“Hullo, Granger,” was his greeting.  I was used to regarding myself as fallen from a high estate, but I was not yet so humble in spirit as to relish being called Granger by a stranger of his stamp.  I tried to freeze him politely.

“Read your stuff in the Hour,” was his rejoinder; “jolly good I call it.  Been doing old Red-Beard?  Let’s have a look.  Yes, yes.  That’s the way—­that’s the real thing—­I call it.  Must have bored you to death ... old de Mersch I mean.  I ought to have had the job, you know.  My business, interviewing people in Paris.  But I don’t mind.  Much rather you did it than I. You do it a heap better.”

I murmured thanks.  There was a pathos about the sleek little man—­a pathos that is always present in the type.  He seemed to be trying to assume a deprecating equality.

“Where are you going to-night?” he asked, with sudden effusiveness.  I was taken aback.  One is not used to being asked these questions after five minutes’ acquaintance.  I said that I had no plans.

“Look here,” he said, brightening up, “come and have dinner with me at Breguet’s, and look in at the Opera afterward.  We’ll have a real nice chat.”

I was too tired to frame an adequate excuse.  Besides, the little man was as eager as a child for a new toy.  We went to Breguet’s and had a really excellent dinner.

“Always come here,” he said; “one meets a lot of swells.  It runs away with a deal of money—­but I don’t care to do things on the cheap, not for the Hour, you know.  You can always be certain when I say that I have a thing from a senator that he is a senator, and not an old woman in a paper kiosque.  Most of them do that sort of thing, you know.”