“Oh, no, it’s a bald statement of fact,” she went on.
“I don’t see how,” I said, involuntarily.
“Your article in the Hour will help. Every trifle will help,” she said. “Things that you understand and others that you cannot.... He is identifying himself with the Duc de Mersch. That looks nothing, but it’s fatal. There will be friendships ... and desertions.”
“Ah!” I said. I had had an inkling of this, and it made me respect her insight into home politics. She must have been alluding to Gurnard, whom everybody—perhaps from fear—pretended to trust. She looked at me and smiled again. It was still the same smile; she was not radiant to-day and pensive to-morrow. “Do you know I don’t like to hear that?” I began.
“Oh, there’s irony in it, and pathos, and that sort of thing,” she said, with the remotest chill of mockery in her intonation. “He goes into it clean-handed enough and he only half likes it. But he sees that it’s his last chance. It’s not that he’s worn out—but he feels that his time has come—unless he does something. And so he’s going to do something. You understand?”
“Not in the least,” I said, light-heartedly.
“Oh, it’s the System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions—the Greenland affair of my friend de Mersch. Churchill is going to make a grand coup with that—to keep himself from slipping down hill, and, of course, it would add immensely to your national prestige. And he only half sees what de Mersch is or isn’t.”
“This is all Greek to me,” I muttered rebelliously.
“Oh, I know, I know,” she said. “But one has to do these things, and I want you to understand. So Churchill doesn’t like the whole business. But he’s under the shadow. He’s been thinking a good deal lately that his day is over—I’ll prove it to you in a minute—and so—oh, he’s going to make a desperate effort to get in touch with the spirit of the times that he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand. So he lets you get his atmosphere. That’s all.”
“Oh, that’s all,” I said, ironically.