"There's a Belgian here whom I want you to meet," he said in his boyish manner, that admirably concealed the power of this man that one was for ever forgetting in his presence, only to remember it all the more acutely when one thought of him afterwards. "It's the chief of the Belgian Medical Department. He's quite a wonderful man."
And we went in to dinner.
The journalist arranged the table.
It was rather an awkward one, numerically, and I was interested to see how he would come out of the problematic affair of four men and one woman.
But with one swift wave of his hand he assigned us to our places.
He sat on one side of the table with the Head of the Belgian Medical Corps at his right.
I sat opposite to him, and the author sat on my left, and the other man who had something to do with Boy Scouts on his left, and there we all were, and a more delightful dinner could not be imagined, for in a way it was exciting through the very fact of being eaten in a city that the Germans only the day before had pelted with twenty bombs.
Personalities come more clearly into evidence at dinner than at any other time, and so I was interested to see how the journalist played his part of host.
What would he be like?
There are so many different kinds of hosts. Would he be the all-seeing, all-reaching, all-divining kind, the kind that knows all you want, and ought to want, and sees that you get it, the kind that says always the right thing at the right moment, and keeps his party alive with his sally of wit and gaiety, and bonhomie, and makes everyone feel that they are having the time of their lives?