“One of the babies was awake. He told me that—that 'my sort of questions'”—he slapped the pile of cables—“were only taken between 11 and 2 P.M. So I waited.”
“And when you got to business?” I asked.
He made a gesture of despair. “It was like talking to children. They'd never heard of it.”
“And your Opposite Number?”
Penfentenyou described him.
“Hush! You mustn't talk like that!” I shuddered. “He's one of the best of good fellows. You should meet him socially.”
“I've done that too,” he said. “Have you?”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried; “but that's the proper thing to say.”
“Oh, he said all the proper things. Only I thought as this was England that they'd more or less have the hang of all the—general hang-together of my Idea. But I had to explain it from the beginning.”
“Ah! They'd probably mislaid the papers,” I said, and I told him the story of a three-million pound insurrection caused by a deputy Under-Secretary sitting upon a mass of green-labelled correspondence instead of reading it.