ttal, and
said: "Of course I haven't any right." But I had a vague, stupid sense
that loyalty to Churchill demanded that I should back up a man he was
backing. As a matter of fact, nothing so direct was a-gate, it couldn't
have been. It was something about shares in one of de Mersch's other
enterprises. Polehampton was going to pick them up for nothing, and they
were going to rise when the boom in de Mersch's began--something of the
sort. And the boom would begin as soon as the news of the agreement
about the railway got abroad.

I let him get it out of me in a way that makes the thought of that bare
place with its gilt book-backs and its three uncomfortable
office-chairs and the ground-glass windows through which one read the
inversion of the legend "Polehampton," all its gloom and its rigid lines
and its pallid light, a memory of confusion. And Polehampton was
properly grateful, and invited me to dine with him and his phantasmal
daughter--who wanted to make my acquaintance. It was like a command to a
state banquet given by a palace official, and Lea would be invited to
meet me. Miss Polehampton did not like Lea, but he had to be asked once
a year--to encourage good feeling, I suppose. The interview dribbled out
on those lines. I asked if it was one of Lea's days at the office. It
was not. I tried to put in a good word for Lea, but it was not very
effective. Polehampton was too subject to his assistant's thorns to be
responsive to praise of him.

So I hurried out of the place. I wanted to be out of this medium in
which my ineffectiveness threatened to proclaim itself to me. It was not
a very difficult matter. I had, in those days, rooms in one of the
political journalists' clubs--a vast mausoleum of white tiles. But a man
used to pack my portmanteau very efficiently and at short notice. At
the station one of those coincidences that are not coincidences made me
run against the great Callan. He was rather unhappy--found it impossible
to make an already distracted porter listen to the end of one of his
sentences with two-second waits between each word. For that reason he
brightened to see me--was delighted to find a through-journey companion
who would take him on terms of greatness. In the railway carriage,
divested of troublesome bags that imparted anxiety to his small face and
a stagger to his walk, he swelled to his normal dimensions.

"So you're--going to--Paris," he meditated, "for the _Hour_."

"I'm going to Par