of men who knew and men who wanted to know—­the shadowy world of people who didn’t matter, but whose eyes and voices were all round one and did somehow matter.  I knew well enough how it had come about.  It was de Mersch—­the State Founder, with his shamed face and his pallid hands.  She had been attracted by his air of greatness, by his elective grand-dukedom, by his protestations.  Women are like that.  She had been attracted and didn’t know what she was doing, didn’t know what the world was over here—­how people talked.  She had been excited by the whirl and flutter of it, and perhaps she didn’t care.  The thing must come to an end, however.  She had said that I should go to her on the morrow.  Well, I would go, and I would put a stop to this.  I had suddenly discovered how very much I was a Granger of Etchingham, after all I had family traditions and graves behind me.  And for the sake of all these people whose one achievement had been the making of a good name I had to intervene now.  After all—­“Bon sang ne” —­does not get itself talked about in that way.

The early afternoon of the morrow found me in a great room—­a faded, sombre salon of the house my aunt had taken in the Faubourg Saint Germain.  Numbers of strong-featured people were talking in groups among the tables and chairs of a time before the Revolution.  I rather forget how I had got there, and what had gone before.  I must have arisen late and passed the intervening hours in a state of trepidation.  I was going to see her, and I was like a cub in love, with a man’s place to fill.  It was a preposterous state of things that set the solid world in a whirl.  Once there, my eyes suddenly took in things.

I had a sense of her standing by my side.  She had just introduced me to my aunt—­a heavy-featured, tired-eyed village tyrant.  She was so obviously worn out, so obviously “not what she had been,” that her face would have been pitiful but for its immovable expression of class pride.  The Grangers of Etchingham, you see, were so absolutely at the top of their own particular kind of tree that it was impossible for them to meet anyone who was not an inferior.  A man might be a cabinet minister, might even be a prince, but he couldn’t be a Granger of Etchingham, couldn’t have such an assortment of graves, each containing a Granger, behind his back.  The expression didn’t even lift for me who had.  It couldn’t, it was fixed there.  One wondered what she was doing in this galere.  It seemed impossible that she should interest herself in the restoration of the Bourbons—­they were all very well, but they weren’t even English, let alone a county family.  I figured it out that she must have set her own village so much in order that there remained nothing but the setting in order of the rest of the world.  Her bored eyes wandered sleepily over the assemblage.  They seemed to have no preferences for any of them.  They rested on the vacuously