whom all Liberals were supposed to hate as a tyrant, was discussed and, on the whole, praised—­as a Liberal.  It seemed somehow that politicians were very important.  And yet, anything seemed important about them except their politics.  Mr. Audley, the chairman, was an amiable, elderly man who still wore Gladstone collars; he was a kind of symbol of all that phantasmal and yet fixed society.  He had never done anything—­not even anything wrong.  He was not fast; he was not even particularly rich.  He was simply in the thing; and there was an end of it.  No party could ignore him, and if he had wished to be in the Cabinet he certainly would have been put there.  The Duke of Chester, the vice-president, was a young and rising politician.  That is to say, he was a pleasant youth, with flat, fair hair and a freckled face, with moderate intelligence and enormous estates.  In public his appearances were always successful and his principle was simple enough.  When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant.  When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able.  In private, in a club of his own class, he was simply quite pleasantly frank and silly, like a schoolboy.  Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously.  Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.  He himself was a Conservative, even in private life.  He had a roll of grey hair over the back of his collar, like certain old-fashioned statesmen, and seen from behind he looked like the man the empire wants.  Seen from the front he looked like a mild, self-indulgent bachelor, with rooms in the Albany—­which he was.

As has been remarked, there were twenty-four seats at the terrace table, and only twelve members of the club.  Thus they could occupy the terrace in the most luxurious style of all, being ranged along the inner side of the table, with no one opposite, commanding an uninterrupted view of the garden, the colours of which were still vivid, though evening was closing in somewhat luridly for the time of year.  The chairman sat in the centre of the line, and the vice-president at the right-hand end of it.  When the twelve guests first trooped into their seats it was the custom (for some unknown reason) for all the fifteen waiters to stand lining the wall like troops presenting arms to the king, while the fat proprietor stood and bowed to the club with radiant surprise, as if he had never heard of them before.  But before the first chink of knife and fork this army of retainers had vanished, only the one or two required to collect and distribute the plates darting about in deathly silence.  Mr. Lever, the proprietor, of course had disappeared in convulsions of courtesy long before.  It would be exaggerative, indeed irreverent, to say that he ever positively appeared again.  But when the important course, the fish