Chapter 7

It was Saturday and, as was his custom during the session, the Foreign
Secretary had gone for privacy and rest till Monday to a small country
house he had within easy reach of town. I went down with a letter from
Fox in my pocket, and early in the afternoon found myself talking
without any kind of inward disturbance to the Minister's aunt, a lean,
elderly lady, with a keen eye, and credited with a profound knowledge of
European politics. She had a rather abrupt manner and a business-like,
brown scheme of coloration. She looked people very straight in the face,
bringing to bear all the penetration which, as rumour said, enabled her
to take a hidden, but very real part in the shaping of our foreign
policy. She seemed to catalogue me, label me, and lay me on the shelf,
before I had given my first answer to her first question.

"You ought to know this part of the country well," she said. I think she
was considering me as a possible canvasser--an infinitesimal thing, but
of a kind possibly worth remembrance at the next General Election.

"No," I said, "I've never been here before."

"Etchingham is only three miles away."

It was new to me to be looked upon as worth consideration for my
place-name. I realised that Miss Churchill accorded me toleration on its
account, that I was regarded as one of the Grangers of Etchingham, who
had taken to literature.

"I met your aunt yesterday," Miss Churchill continued. She had met
everybody yesterday.

"Yes," I said, non-committally. I wondered what had happened at that
meeting. My aunt and I had never been upon terms. She was a great
personage in her part of the world, a great dowager land-owner, as poor
as a mouse, and as respectable as a hen. She was, moreover, a keen
politician on the side of Miss Churchill. I, who am neither land-owner,
nor respectable, nor politician, had never been acknowledged--but I knew
that, for the sake of the race, she would have refrained from enlarging
on my shortcomings.

"Has she found a companion to suit her yet?" I said, absent-mindedly. I
was thinking of an old legend of my mother's. Miss Churchill looked me
in between the eyes again. She was preparing to relabel me, I think. I
had become a spiteful humourist. Possibly I might be useful for platform
malice.

"Why, yes," she said, the faintest of twinkles in her eyes, "she has
adopted a niece."

The legend went that, at a hotly contested election in which my aunt had
played a prominent part, a rainbow poster had beset the walls. "Who
starved her governess?" it had inquired.

My accidental reference to such electioneering details placed me upon an