“Do not be too hasty with us. Remember, France have much to fear on the Continent. If we do what seem to you wrong, then be patient. It is not perversity, always.”
He clambered into the car that waited, and drove away through the cheering ranks of his fellow-countrymen....
And I wondered.
WITH MR. LLOYD GEORGE DURING HIS PREMIERSHIP
“... And which of us,” he said, smiling at me over the breakfast table, “which of us do you wish to see?”
I murmured that I did not understand—er....
“A friend of yours writing in the press,” he explained drily, “has been good enough to find in me a second Jekyll and Hyde. Very well. With which of us do you wish to talk—Lloyd Jekyll or Hyde George?”
“Which,” I asked cautiously, “is which?”
“Both,” he replied, “are Me. Your friend misconceives the situation. He attributes all my political mistakes and failures to Hyde; and the successes I attain to Jekyll. But the truth is that between them they have always pulled me this way and that; and most of my actions are a compromise between their conflicting injunctions. Hyde is still the shrewd Welsh solicitor, who sharpened his wits from morning to night, that Jekyll might have his opportunity. Jekyll is still the idealist who dreamt in his youth of Welsh Home Rule; who upheld the Boers in his middle age because of the nobility of their struggle against overwhelming odds; and now in the fullness of maturity has conferred upon Ireland the freedom she has sought for centuries.”
“But——” I interjected.