He spoke very gently, as if he did not wish to offend me by this closing of the door.  He seemed suddenly to grow very old and very gray.  There was a stile in the dusty hedge-row, and he walked toward it, meditating.  In a moment he looked back at me.  “I had forgotten,” he said; “I meant to suggest that we should wait here—­I am a little tired.”  He perched himself on the top bar and became lost in the inspection of the cord of his glasses.  I went toward him.

“I knew,” I said, “that you could not listen to ... to the sort of thing.  But there were reasons.  I felt forced.  You will forgive me.”  He looked up at me, starting as if he had forgotten my presence.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “I have a certain—­I can’t think of the right word—­say respect—­for your judgment and—­and motives ...  But you see, there are, for instance, my colleagues.  I couldn’t go to them ...”  He lost the thread of his idea.

“To tell the truth,” I said, with a sudden impulse for candour, “it isn’t the political aspect of the matter, but the personal.  I spoke because it was just possible that I might be of service to you—­personally—­and because I would like you ... to make a good fight for it.”  I had borrowed her own words.

He looked up at me and smiled.  “Thank you,” he said.  “I believe you think it’s a losing game,” he added, with a touch of gray humour that was like a genial hour of sunlight on a wintry day.  I did not answer.  A little way down the road Miss Churchill’s carriage whirled into sight, sparkling in the sunlight, and sending up an attendant cloud of dust that melted like smoke through the dog-roses of the leeward hedge.

“So you don’t think much of me as a politician,” Churchill suddenly deduced smilingly.  “You had better not tell that to my aunt.”

I went up to town with Churchill that evening.  There was nothing waiting for me there, but I did not want to think.  I wanted to be among men, among crowds of men, to be dazed, to be stupefied, to hear nothing for the din of life, to be blinded by the blaze of lights.

There were plenty of people in Churchill’s carriage; a military member and a local member happened to be in my immediate neighbourhood.  Their minds were full of the financial scandals, and they dinned their alternating opinions into me.  I assured them that I knew nothing about the matter, and they grew more solicitous for my enlightenment.

“It all comes from having too many eggs in one basket,” the local member summed up.  “The old-fashioned small enterprises had their disadvantages, but—­mind you—­these gigantic trusts....  Isn’t that so, General?”

“Oh, I quite agree with you,” the general barked; “at the same time....”  Their voices sounded on, intermingling, indistinguishable, soothing even.  I seemed to be listening to the hum of a threshing-machine—­a passage of sound booming on one note, a passage, a half-tone higher, and so on, and so on.  Visible things grew hazy, fused into one another.