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person to turn a tired business man into a thumping success.  She WAS and she DID. . . .  Can you think of a better reason?”
    “There’s generally considered to be ONE better reason.”
    He switched the subject suddenly, pointing out of the window to a news placard that proclaimed, in letters a foot high:  “Collapse of England.”  At that moment I felt that one thing Miss Hobbs had said about him WAS true—that look in his eyes as if he were searching for something and couldn’t find it.  He began to talk rapidly and nervously, apropos of the placard:  “Odd to think of some foreigner translating without knowing it’s only about cricket . . . it was something you said about that on a train that first made me want to know you better—but really, in a sense, it doesn’t refer to cricket at all, but to how God-damned sure we are of ourselves—you can’t imagine the same phrase in the streets of Paris or Berlin—it would begin panic or riots or something. . . .  Just think of it—
    ‘Débâcle de la France’ or ‘Untergang Deutschlands.’ . . .  Impossible . . . but here it means nothing because we don’t believe it could ever happen—and that’s not wishful thinking—it’s neither wishing nor thinking, but a kind of inbreathed illusion. . . .  Reminds me of that last plenary session of the London Conference when it was quite clear there was to be no effective disarmament by anybody and we were all hard at work covering up the failure of civilization’s last hope with a mess of smeary platitudes . . .  Lord, how tired I was, listening to strings of words that meant nothing in any language and even less when you had to wait for an interpreter to turn ‘em into two others . . . and all the time the dusty sunlight fell in slabs over the pink bald heads—godheads from the power entrusted to them and gargoyles from the way I hated ‘em . . . and during all that morning, full of the trapped sunlight and the distant drone of traffic past the Cenotaph, there was only one clean eager thing that happened—young Drexel whispering to me during a tepid outburst of applause:  ‘See the old boy in the third row—fifth from the end—Armenia or Irak or some place . . . but did you ever see anybody more like Harry Tate?’ . . . And by Jove, he WAS like Harry Tate, and Drexel and I lived on it for the rest of the session—lived on it and on our own pathetic fancy that foreigners were strange and at best amusing creatures, rather like music-hall comedians or one’s French master at school—tolerable if they happen to be musicians or dancers or ice-cream sellers—but definitely to be snubbed if they venture on the really serious business of governing the world. . . .  Look—there’s another!”  It was a later placard, proclaiming in letters equally large, “England Now Without Hope.”  Rainier laughed.  “Maybe some fussy archaeologist of the twenty-fifth century—a relative of Macaulay’s sketching New Zealander—will dig this up from a rubbish-heap and say it establishes definite proof that we’d all been well warned in advance . . . .  Has my wife got a party tonight?”
    “Yes.”
    “What sort of a crowd?”
    “Mostly sporting and dramatic, I think.”
    “Then I’ll dine and sleep at the Club.  Borotra’s the only dramatic sportsman I care about, and he probably won’t come.”
    He put his head out of the cab window, giving the change of address, and also telling the man to drive more slowly.  I could see he was nervously excited, and I was beginning to know by now that when he was in such a mood he talked a good deal in an attempt to race his thoughts—an attempt which usually failed, leaving a litter of unfinished sentences, mixed metaphors, and unpolished epigrams, with here and there some phrase worthy of one of his speeches, but flung off so carelessly that if the hearer did not catch it at the time Rainier himself could never recall it afterwards.  I have tried to