(_Mrs. Manson brings a large tasselled fez of brilliant colour, and
adjusts it to his head while he drinks. She then, goes to the door, takes
a hot-water bottle from the bands of an unseen servant and effects the
necessary changes. All this is done so unobtrusively that the Statesman
resumes his theme without regarding her. When she has done she goes_.)

Ah! Where was I?

DOCTOR. If you "could understand," you said.

STATESMAN. Ah, yes; understand. Again a strange faculty of divination came
upon me. I stood upon the international plane, amid a congress of Powers,
and let my eye travel once more over the Alliances of Europe. I looked,
Doctor, and truly I saw, then, surprising shifts and changes in the
political and diplomatic fabric which I had helped to frame. Time, and
kingdoms had passed. I saw, at home and abroad, the rise of new parties
into power, strange coalitions, defections, alliances; old balances
destroyed, new balances set up in their place. I saw frontiers annulled,
treaties violated, world-problems tumbling like clowns, standing on their
heads and crying, "Here we are again!" Power--after all, had solved
nothing!

My eye travelled over that problem of the Near East, which, for some
generations at least, we thought to have settled, to Vienna, Petersburg,
Constantinople--and away farther East to Teheran and--that other place
whose name I have forgotten. And, as I looked, a Recording Angel came, and
cried to me in a voice strangely familiar, the voice of one of my most
detested colleagues--trusted, I mean--"You have put your money on the
wrong horse!"