I venture to dwell upon one more experience of that week-end party.  The Friday evening of my arrival I was met at the station, not by a limousine with a chauffeur and footman, but by a young woman with a taxicab—­one of the many reminders that a war is going on.  London had been reeking in a green-yellow fog, but here the mist was white, and through it I caught glimpses of the silhouettes of stately trees in a park, and presently saw the great house with its clock-tower looming up before me.  A fire was crackling in the hall, and before it my hostess was conversing amusedly with a well-known sculptor—­a sculptor typical of these renaissance times, large, full-blooded, with vigorous opinions on all sorts of matters.

“A lecturer is coming down from London to talk to the wounded in the amusement-hall of the hospital,” our hostess informed us.  “And you both must come and speak too.”

The three of us got into the only motor of which the establishment now boasts, a little runabout using a minimum of “petrol,” and she guided us rapidly by devious roads through the fog until a blur of light proclaimed the presence of a building, one of some score or more built on the golf-course by the British Government.  I have not space hereto describe that hospital, which is one of the best in England; but it must be observed that its excellence and the happiness of its inmates are almost wholly due to the efforts of the lady who now conducted us across the stage of the amusement-hall, where all the convalescents who could walk or who could be rolled thither in chairs were gathered.  The lecturer had not arrived.  But the lady of the manor seated herself at the speaker’s table, singling out Scotch wits in the audience—­for whom she was more than a match—­while the sculptor and I looked on and grinned and resisted her blandishments to make speeches.  When at last the lecturer came he sat down informally on the table with one foot hanging in the air and grinned, too, at her bantering but complimentary introduction.  It was then I discovered for the first time that he was one of the best educational experts of that interesting branch of the British Government, the Department of Reconstruction, whose business it is to teach the convalescents the elements of social and political science.  This was not to be a lecture, he told them, but a debate in which every man must take a part.  And his first startling question was this: 

“Why should Mr. Lloyd George, instead of getting five thousand pounds a year for his services as prime minister, receive any more than a common labourer?”

The question was a poser.  The speaker folded his hands and beamed down at them; he seemed fairly to radiate benignity.

“Now we mustn’t be afraid of him, just because he seems to be intelligent,” declared our hostess.  This sally was greeted with spasmodic laughter.  Her eyes flitted from bench to bench, yet met nothing save averted glances.  “Jock!  Where are you, Jock?  Why don’t you speak up?—­you’ve never been downed before.”