his role.  “We have done nothing worth doing,” he said.  “As for me, I have cut a figure!” He reflected—­no doubt on his ample patrician years, on the fine great houses that had been his setting, the teeming race-courses that had roared his name, the enthusiastic meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian beginnings. . . .  “I have been a fool,” he said compactly.  They heard him in a sympathetic and respectful silence.

Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, so far as I was concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham.  Ever and again Gurker protruded into the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throaty voice, a big nose, a coarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip, eyes peering amidst folds and wrinkles.  He made his confession for his race.  “We Jews,” he said, “have gone through the system of this world, creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much.  Our racial self-conceit has been monstrous.  We seem to have used our ample coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to develop and master and maintain the convention of property, to turn life into a sort of mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. . . .  We have had no sense of service to mankind.  Beauty which is godhead—­we made it a possession.”

These men and these sayings particularly remain in my memory.  Perhaps, indeed, I wrote them down at the time, but that I do not now remember.  How Sir Digby Privet, Revel, Markheimer, and the others sat I do not now recall; they came in as voices, interruptions, imperfectly assigned comments. . . .

One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revel these men had not particularly wanted the power they held; had desired to do nothing very much in the positions they had secured.  They had found themselves in the cabinet, and until this moment of illumination they had not been ashamed; but they had made no ungentlemanly fuss about the matter.  Eight of that fifteen came from the same school, had gone through an entirely parallel education; some Greek linguistics, some elementary mathematics, some emasculated “science,” a little history, a little reading in the silent or timidly orthodox English literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, all eight had imbibed the same dull gentlemanly tradition of behavior; essentially boyish, unimaginative—­with neither keen swords nor art in it, a tradition apt to slobber into sentiment at a crisis and make a great virtue of a simple duty rather clumsily done.  None of these eight had made any real experiments with life, they had lived in blinkers, they had been passed from nurse to governess, from governess to preparatory school, from Eton to Oxford, from Oxford to the politico-social routine.  Even their vices and lapses had been according to certain conceptions of good form.  They had all gone to the races surreptitiously from Eton, had all cut up to town from Oxford to see life—­music-hall life—­had all come to heel again.  Now suddenly they discovered their limitations. . . .