panting even--as a nation pants--to get back by their own way that they
understood and saw; were hauling, and hauling desperately, at the
weighted rope that was dragging them forward. Churchill stood up there
and repeated: "Mine is the only way--the saner policy," and his words
would fly all over the country to fall upon the deaf ears of the
panic-stricken, who could not understand the use of calmness, of
trifling even, in the face of danger, who suspected the calmness as one
suspects the thing one has not. At the end of it I received his summons
to a small door at the back of the building. The speech seemed to have
passed out of his mind far more than out of mine.

"So you have come," he said; "that's good, and so.... Let us walk a
little way ... out of this. My aunt will pick us up on the road." He
linked his arm into mine and propelled me swiftly down the bright, broad
street. "I'm sorry you came in for that, but--one has to do these
things."

There was a sort of resisted numbness in his voice, a lack of any
resiliency. My heart sank a little. It was as if I were beside an
invalid who did not--must not--know his condition; as if I were pledged
not to notice anything. In the open the change struck home as a hammer
strikes; in the pitiless searching of the unrestrained light, his
grayness, his tremulousness, his aloofness from the things about him,
came home to me like a pang.

"You look a bit fagged," I said, "perhaps we ought not to talk about
work." His thoughts seemed to come back from a great distance, oh, from
an infinite distance beyond the horizon, the soft hills of that fat
country. "You want rest," I added.