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 excellent footing with Miss Churchill.  I seemed quite unawares to have asserted myself a social equal, a person not to be treated as a casual journalist.  I became, in fact, not the representative of the Hour—­but an Etchingham Granger that competitive forces had compelled to accept a journalistic plum.  I began to see the line I was to take throughout my interviewing campaign.  On the one hand, I was “one of us,” who had temporarily strayed beyond the pale; on the other, I was to be a sort of great author’s bottle-holder.