ty of that suggestion,
for nearly all it has amounted to an enduring broadening
of all the issues of life. . . .

Section 8

One irrelevant memory comes back to me, irrelevant, and yet by some
subtle trick of quality it summarizes the Change for me. It is the
memory of a woman's very beautiful face, a woman with a flushed
face and tear-bright eyes who went by me without speaking, rapt
in some secret purpose. I passed her when in the afternoon of the
first day, struck by a sudden remorse, I went down to Menton to send
a telegram to my mother telling her all was well with me. Whither
this woman went I do not know, nor whence she came; I never saw her
again, and only her face, glowing with that new and luminous
resolve, stands out for me. . . .

But that expression was the world's.

CHAPTER THE THIRD

THE CABINET COUNCIL

Section 1

AND what a strange unprecedented thing was that cabinet council at
which I was present, the council that was held two days later in
Melmount's bungalow, and which convened the conference to frame the
constitution of the World State. I was there because it was convenient
for me to stay with Melmount. I had nowhere to go particularly,
and there was no one at his bungalow, to which his broken ankle
confined him, but a secretary and a valet to help him to begin his
share of the enormous labors that evidently lay before the rulers
of the world. I wrote shorthand, and as there was not even a phonograph
available, I went in so soon as his ankle had been dressed, and
sat at his desk to write at his dictation. It is characteristic
of the odd slackness that went with the spasmodic violence of the
old epoch, that the secretary could not use shorthand and that
there was no telephone whatever in the place. Every message had
to be taken to the village post-office in that grocer's shop at
Menton, half a mile away. . . . So I sat in the back of Melmount's
room, his desk had been thrust aside, and made such memoranda as
were needed. At that time his room seemed to me the most beautifully
furnished in the world, and I could identify now the vivid cheerfulness
of the chintz of the sofa on which the great statesman lay just in
front of me, the fine rich paper, the red sealing-wax, the silver
equipage of the desk I used. I know now that my presence in that
room was a strange and remarkable thing, the open door, even the
coming and going of Parker the secretary, innovations. In the old
days