for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On the
intervening occasion we had what seems now to have been a long sustained
conversation about the political situation and the books and papers I
had written.

I wonder if it was.

What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that time,
and how little I reckoned on the part she would play in my life! And
since she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now of
those early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this section
my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by itself and sketching faces
on the blotting pad--one impish wizened visage is oddly like little
Bailey--and I have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealth
of memories. She sits below me on the low wall under the olive trees
with our little child in her arms. She is now the central fact in my
life. It still seems a little incredible that that should be so. She has
destroyed me as a politician, brought me to this belated rebeginning of
life. When I sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the
Arabian fisherman who tried to put the genius back into the pot from
which it had spread gigantic across the skies....

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our
labouring ascendant car--my colours fluttered from handle-bar and
shoulder-knot--and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She
cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.

"What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom
by way of repayment I got those magic letters, that knighthood of the
underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to us. "One
of the best workers you have," he said....

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross from
the strain of sustained amiability, to Sir Graham Rivers' house. It
seemed all softness and quiet--I recall dead white panelling and
oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace between white
marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave and fine--and how
Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that
made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow under her cloud of black
hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss Gamer, to whom the house was
to descend, a well-dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing
responsibility for Isabel in every phrase and gesture. And there was a
very pleasant doctor,