pted
the role of a twentieth-century British Roman patrician of culture,
who had divided his time almost equally between his jockeys,
politics, and the composition of literary studies in the key of
his role. "We have done nothing worth doing," he said. "As for me,
I have cut a figure!" He reflected--no doubt on his ample patrician
years, on the fine great houses that had been his setting, the
teeming race-courses that had roared his name, the enthusiastic
meetings he had fed with fine hopes, the futile Olympian beginnings.
. . . "I have been a fool," he said compactly. They heard him in
a sympathetic and respectful silence.

Gurker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was partially occulted, so
far as I was concerned, by the back of Lord Adisham. Ever and again
Gurker protruded into the discussion, swaying forward, a deep throaty
voice, a big nose, a coarse mouth with a drooping everted lower lip,
eyes peering amidst folds and wrinkles. He made his confession for
his race. "We Jews," he said, "have gone through the system of this
world, creating nothing, consolidating many things, destroying much.
Our racial self-conceit has been monstrous. We seem to have used our
ample coarse intellectuality for no other purpose than to develop
and master and maintain the convention of property, to turn life into
a sort of mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly. . . . We
have had no sense of service to mankind. Beauty which is godhead--we
made it a possession."

These men and these sayings particularly remain in my memory.
Perhaps, indeed, I wrote them down at the time, but that I do not
now remember. How Sir Digby Privet, Revel, Markheimer, and the others
sat I do not now recall; they came in as voices, interruptions,
imperfectly assigned comments. . . .

One got a queer impression that except perhaps for Gurker or Revel
these men had not particularly wanted the power they held; had
desired to do nothing very much in the positions they had secured.
They had found themselves in the cabinet, and until this moment
of illumination they had not been ashamed; but they had made no
ungentlemanly fuss about the matter. Eight of that fifteen came from
the same school, had gone through an entirely parallel education;
some Greek linguistics, some elementary mathematics, some emasculated
"science," a little history, a little reading in the silent or
timidly orthodox English literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth cent