Dr. Martineau went more than half way to meet Lady Hardy’s disposition to treat him as a friend of the family.  He had conceived a curious, half maternal affection for Sir Richmond that had survived even the trying incident of the Salisbury parting and revived very rapidly during the last few weeks.  This affection extended itself now to Lady Hardy.  Hers was a type that had always appealed to him.  He could understand so well the perplexed loyalty with which she was now setting herself to gather together some preservative and reassuring evidences of this man who had always been; as she put it, “never quite here.”  It was as if she felt that now it was at last possible to make a definite reality of him.  He could be fixed.  And as he was fixed he would stay.  Never more would he be able to come in and with an almost expressionless glance wither the interpretation she had imposed upon him.  She was finding much comfort in this task of reconstruction.  She had gathered together in the drawingroom every presentable portrait she had been able to find of him.  He had never, she said, sat to a painter, but there was an early pencil sketch done within a couple of years of their marriage; there was a number of photographs, several of which—­she wanted the doctor’s advice upon this point—­she thought might be enlarged; there was a statuette done by some woman artist who had once beguiled him into a sitting.  There was also a painting she had had worked up from a photograph and some notes.  She flitted among these memorials, going from one to the other, undecided which to make the standard portrait.  “That painting, I think, is most like,” she said:  “as he was before the war.  But the war and the Commission changed him,—­worried him and aged him....  I grudged him to that Commission.  He let it worry him frightfully.”

“It meant very much to him,” said Dr. Martineau.

“It meant too much to him.  But of course his ideas were splendid.  You know it is one of my hopes to get some sort of book done, explaining his ideas.  He would never write.  He despised it—­unreasonably.  A real thing done, he said, was better than a thousand books.  Nobody read books, he said, but women, parsons and idle people.  But there must be books.  And I want one.  Something a little more real than the ordinary official biography....  I have thought of young Leighton, the secretary of the Commission.  He seems thoroughly intelligent and sympathetic and really anxious to reconcile Richmond’s views with those of the big business men on the Committee.  He might do....  Or perhaps I might be able to persuade two or three people to write down their impressions of him.  A sort of memorial volume....  But he was shy of friends.  There was no man he talked to very intimately about his ideas unless it was to you...  I wish I had the writer’s gift, doctor.”

Section 7

It was on the second afternoon that Lady Hardy summoned Dr. Martineau by telephone.  “Something rather disagreeable,” she said.  “If you could spare the time.  If you could come round.