intellectual or moral support. I am on the spot, but I am also at the
wheel and must not be disturbed."

Then he descended, fresh as a boy, although the promontory which
prevented a direct vision of his toes showed accretions. The front-room
was a shrine for his breakfast. She served it herself, in her-white
apron, promptly on his arrival! Eggs! Toast! Coffee! It was nothing,
that breakfast; and yet it was everything. No breakfast could have been
better. He had probably eaten about fifteen thousand hotel breakfasts
before Alice taught him what a real breakfast was. After serving it she
lingered for a moment, and then handed him the _Daily Telegraph_, which
had been lying on a chair.

"Here's your _Telegraph_," she said cheerfully, tacitly disowning any
property or interest in the _Telegraph_. For her, newspapers were men's
toys. She never opened a paper, never wanted to know what was going on
in the world. She was always intent upon her own affairs. Politics--and
all that business of the mere machinery of living: she perfectly ignored
it! She lived. She did nothing but live. She lived every hour. Priam
felt truly that he had at last got down to the bed-rock of life.

There were twenty pages of the _Telegraph_, far more matter than a man
could read in a day even if he read and read and neither ate nor slept.
And all of it so soothing in its rich variety! It gently lulled you; it
was the ideal companion for a poached egg; upstanding against the
coffee-pot, it stood for the solidity of England in the seas. Priam
folded it large; he read all the articles down to the fold; then turned
the thing over, and finished all of them. After communing with the
_Telegraph_, he communed with his own secret nature, and wandered about,
rolling a cigarette. Ah! The first cigarette! His wanderings led him to