He has an imperious eye, and I did not attempt to meet it. "Why?" he demanded....
I did not answer. Willett had loyally covered my too frequent absence and neglect, but I knew and Glenfield knew that I had let my paper down. The Circus was slipping backward. Possibly there was something in Glenfield's suggestion about post-war slump. Now, when all the world should have been working as it had never worked before, so little work seemed worth the doing. The Circus, which after all is a vastly important instrument of democratic government, seemed to me a thing of stunts and japes and cynical mockery of the recent stupendous years; my own work, once so much to me that I had sacrificed to it the joy and ease of half a life, seemed a thing that the world could do perfectly well without. I missed my timber and gun-cotton and cordage and corrugated iron. My real books were my stores-ledgers "A" and "B," the Regulations for Engineer Services my only Muse. I feared—nay, I almost hoped—that I should write no more novels. My bolt seemed shot. It is a depressing thing to have been a younger novelist and to have wasted your life.
But I could not honestly take the way out that Glenfield suggested. Over and above the burden that I shared with everybody else, I had let my private affairs come between me and the work Glenfield paid me to do. The infernal Case had cramped itself on my shoulders and was making a slacker and a fraud of me. I wished that Glenfield had taken any way but this kindly one. There was only one answer to make to him.
"Well?" he said at last.
"Oh—let me send in my resignation," I growled. "I've let you down and will take the consequences."
"Consequences my eye," he replied bluntly. "The drop's nothing—a thousand or two—we can pick that up in no time. It's you I'm worrying about, not the paper. You've something on your mind. What is it? I've a bit of a pull here and there, you know, and I may be able to help."
To hear Lord Glenfield describe his appalling power as "a bit of a pull here and there" was almost comic; nobody living knows where his power ends. I consider it the most singular phenomenon of a democratic age that it gives to a few men such power as no ancient emperor ever dreamed of. Indeed, if one's conception of democracy is that it is the age's ailment, it seems to carry within itself hope of its own cure. Few men have been so bitterly attacked as Glenfield, but in my opinion he is the natural corrective to our new disease of numbers, our malady of stultifying votes.
"Of course, I'm assuming it's a purely private affair," he went on.
"Oh, it's public enough—or looks like being—that's part of the trouble——"
"Yes?" he said invitingly....