“It’s all right, Willoughby,” she said, as we drew level, “I’ve found someone else to face the music with me; you can go back to Effie.”  A bronzed and grateful young man murmured thanks to me.

“It’s an awful relief, Granger,” he said; “can’t think how you can do it.  I’m hooked, but you....”

“He’s the better man,” his mother-in-law-elect said, over her shoulder.  She sailed slowly up the aisle beside me, an almost heroic figure of a matron.  “Splendidly timed, you see,” she said, “do you observe my husband’s embarrassment?”

It was splendid to see Churchill again, standing there negligently, with the diffidence of a boy amid the bustle of applause.  I understood suddenly why I loved him so, this tall, gray man with the delicate, almost grotesque, mannerisms.  He appealed to me by sheer force of picturesqueness, appealed as some forgotten mediaeval city might.  I was concerned for him as for some such dying place, standing above the level plains; I was jealous lest it should lose one jot of its glory, of its renown.  He advocated his saner policy before all those people; stood up there and spoke gently, persuasively, without any stress of emotion, without more movement than an occasional flutter of the glasses he held in his hand.  One would never have recognised that the thing was a fighting speech but for the occasional shiver of his audience.  They were thinking of their Slingsbys; he affecting, insouciantly, to treat them as rational people.

It was extraordinary to sit there shut in by that wall of people all of one type, of one idea; the idea of getting back; all conscious that a force of which they knew nothing was dragging them forward over the edge of a glacier, into a crevasse.  They wanted to get back, were struggling, panting even—­as a nation pants—­to get back by their own way that they understood and saw; were hauling, and hauling desperately, at the weighted rope that was dragging them forward.  Churchill stood up there and repeated:  “Mine is the only way—­the saner policy,” and his words would fly all over the country to fall upon the deaf ears of the panic-stricken, who could not understand the use of calmness, of trifling even, in the face of danger, who suspected the calmness as one suspects the thing one has not.  At the end of it I received his summons to a small door at the back of the building.  The speech seemed to have passed out of his mind far more than out of mine.

“So you have come,” he said; “that’s good, and so....  Let us walk a little way ... out of this.  My aunt will pick us up on the road.”  He linked his arm into mine and propelled me swiftly down the bright, broad street.  “I’m sorry you came in for that, but—­one has to do these things.”

There was a sort of resisted numbness in his voice, a lack of any resiliency.  My heart sank a little.  It was as if I were beside an invalid who did not—­must not—­know his condition; as if I were pledged not to notice anything.  In the open the change struck home as a hammer strikes; in the pitiless searching of the unrestrained light, his grayness, his tremulousness, his aloofness from the things about him, came home to me like a pang.