“There must be a Presidential Address,” said Boon, “and these things always do have a president.”
“Lord Rosebery,” suggested Wilkins.
“Lord Morley,” said Dodd.
“Lord Bryce.”
Then we looked at one another.
“For my own part,” said Boon, “if we are going in for that sort of thing, I favour Lord Reay.
“You see, Lord Reay has never done anything at all connected with literature. Morley and Bryce and Rosebery have at any rate written things—historical studies, addresses, things like that—but Reay has never written anything, and he let Gollancz make him president of the British Academy without a murmur. This seems to mark him out for this further distinction. He is just the sort of man who would be made—and who would let himself be made—president of a British affair of this sort, and they would hoist him up and he would talk for two or three hours without a blush. Just like that other confounded peer—what was his name?—who bored and bored and bored at the Anatole France dinner…. In the natural course of things it would be one of these literary lords….”
“What would he say?” asked Dodd.
“Maunderings, of course. It will make the book rather dull. I doubt if I can report him at length…. He will speak upon contemporary letters, the lack of current achievement…. I doubt if a man like Lord Reay ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes what these British literary aristocrats do with all their time. Probably he left off reading somewhere in the eighties. He won’t have noted it, of course, and he will be under the impression that nothing has been written for the past thirty years.”
“Good Lord!” said Wilkins.