heavens, how we talked! He was almost always deferential, I almost
always dogmatic; perhaps because the conversation kept on my own ground.
Politics we never touched. I seemed to feel that if I broached them, I
should be checked--politely, but very definitely. Perhaps he actually
contrived to convey as much to me; perhaps I evolved the idea that if I
were to say:

"What do you think about the 'Greenland System'"--he would answer:

"I try not to think about it," or whatever gently closuring phrase his
mind conceived. But I never did so; there were so many other topics.

He was then writing his _Life of Cromwell_ and his mind was very full of
his subject. Once he opened his heart, after delicately sounding me for
signs of boredom. It happened, by the merest chance--one of those blind
chances that inevitably lead in the future--that I, too, was obsessed at
that moment by the Lord Oliver. A great many years before, when I was a
yearling of tremendous plans, I had set about one of those glorious
novels that one plans--a splendid thing with Old Noll as the hero or the
heavy father. I had haunted the bookstalls in search of local colour and
had wonderfully well invested my half-crowns. Thus a company of
seventeenth century tracts, dog-eared, coverless, but very glorious
under their dust, accompany me through life. One parts last with those
relics of a golden age, and during my late convalescence I had reread
many of them, the arbitrary half-remembered phrases suggesting all sorts
of scenes--lamplight in squalid streets, trays full of weather-beaten
books. So, even then, my mind was full of Mercurius Rusticus. Mr.
Churchill on Cromwell amused me immensely and even excited me. It was
life, this attending at a self-revelation of an impossible temperament.
It did me good, as he had said of my pseudo-sister. It was fantastic--as