A vote of thanks was carried, and then I found myself shaking hands with Ivery while Blenkiron stood a yard off, talking to one of the Misses Weekes.  The next moment I was being introduced.

‘Mr Brand, very pleased to meet you,’ said the voice I knew so well.  ’Mr Ivery has been telling me about you, and I guess we’ve got something to say to each other.  We’re both from noo countries, and we’ve got to teach the old nations a little horse-sense.’

Mr Ivery’s car—­the only one left in the neighbourhood—­carried us to his villa, and presently we were seated in a brightly-lit dining-room.  It was not a pretty house, but it had the luxury of an expensive hotel, and the supper we had was as good as any London restaurant.  Gone were the old days of fish and toast and boiled milk.  Blenkiron squared his shoulders and showed himself a noble trencherman.

‘A year ago,’ he told our host, ’I was the meanest kind of dyspeptic.  I had the love of righteousness in my heart, but I had the devil in my stomach.  Then I heard stories about the Robson Brothers, the star surgeons way out west in White Springs, Nebraska.  They were reckoned the neatest hands in the world at carving up a man and removing devilments from his intestines.  Now, sir, I’ve always fought pretty shy of surgeons, for I considered that our Maker never intended His handiwork to be reconstructed like a bankrupt Dago railway.  But by that time I was feeling so almighty wretched that I could have paid a man to put a bullet through my head.  “There’s no other way,” I said to myself.  “Either you forget your religion and your miserable cowardice and get cut up, or it’s you for the Golden Shore.”  So I set my teeth and journeyed to White Springs, and the Brothers had a look at my duodenum.  They saw that the darned thing wouldn’t do, so they sidetracked it and made a noo route for my noo-trition traffic.  It was the cunningest piece of surgery since the Lord took a rib out of the side of our First Parent.  They’ve got a mighty fine way of charging, too, for they take five per cent of a man’s income, and it’s all one to them whether he’s a Meat King or a clerk on twenty dollars a week.  I can tell you I took some trouble to be a very rich man last year.’

All through the meal I sat in a kind of stupor.  I was trying to assimilate the new Blenkiron, and drinking in the comfort of his heavenly drawl, and I was puzzling my head about Ivery.  I had a ridiculous notion that I had seen him before, but, delve as I might into my memory, I couldn’t place him.  He was the incarnation of the commonplace, a comfortable middle-class sentimentalist, who patronized pacificism out of vanity, but was very careful not to dip his hands too far.  He was always damping down Blenkiron’s volcanic utterances.  ’Of course, as you know, the other side have an argument which I find rather hard to meet . . .’  ’I can sympathize with patriotism, and even with jingoism, in certain moods, but I always come back to this difficulty.’  ’Our opponents are not ill-meaning so much as ill-judging,’—­these were the sort of sentences he kept throwing in.  And he was full of quotations from private conversations he had had with every sort of person—­including members of the Government.  I remember that he expressed great admiration for Mr Balfour.