ling frankly. "Even
now," he said, "it's odd, but the whole of that seems like a silly
dream. Do you think there WAS a Lord Warden? Do you really believe
we sank all that machinery--for fun? It was a dream. And yet--it
happened."

By all the standards of the former time it would have been remarkable
that I talked quite easily and freely with so great a man. "Yes,"
I said; "that's it. One feels one has awakened--from something
more than that green gas. As though the other things also--weren't
quite real."

He knitted his brows and felt the calf of his leg thoughtfully. "I
made a speech at Colchester," he said.

I thought he was going to add something more about that, but there
lingered a habit of reticence in the man that held him for the
moment. "It is a very curious thing," he broke away; "that this
pain should be, on the whole, more interesting than disagreeable."

"You are in pain?"

"My ankle is! It's either broken or badly sprained--I think sprained;
it's very painful to move, but personally I'm not in pain. That
sort of general sickness that comes with local injury--not a trace
of it! . . ." He mused and remarked, "I was speaking at Colchester,
and saying things about the war. I begin to see it better. The
reporters--scribble, scribble. Max Sutaine, 1885. Hubbub. Compliments
about the oysters. Mm--mm. . . . What was it? About the war? A war
that must needs be long and bloody, taking toll from castle and
cottage, taking toll! . . . Rhetorical gusto! Was I drunk last
night?"

His eyebrows puckered. He had drawn up his right knee, his elbow
rested thereon and his chin on his fist. The deep-set gray eyes
beneath his thatch of eyebrow stared at unknown things. "My God!"
he murmured, "My God!" with a note of disgust. He made a big brooding
figure in the sunlight, he had an effect of more than physical
largeness; he made me feel that it became me to wait upon his thinking.
I had never met a man of this sort before; I did not know
such men existed. . . .

It is a curious thing, that I cannot now recall any ideas whatever
that I had before the Change about the personalities of statesmen,
but I doubt if ever in those days I thought of them at all as
tangible individual human beings, conceivably of some intellectual
complexity. I believe that my impression was a straightforward blend
of caricature and newspaper leader. I certainly had no respect for
them. And now without servility or any insincerity whatever, as i