purchased is cheap; nor is anything they want lacking. On the
walls hang a large map of South America, a pictorial
advertisement of a steamship company, an impressive portrait of
Gladstone, and several caricatures of Mr Balfour as a rabbit and
Mr Chamberlain as a fox by Francis Carruthers Gould.

At twenty minutes to five o'clock on a summer afternoon in 1904,
the room is empty. Presently the outer door is opened, and a
valet comes in laden with a large Gladstone bag, and a strap of
rugs. He carries them into the inner room. He is a respectable
valet, old enough to have lost all alacrity, and acquired an air
of putting up patiently with a great deal of trouble and
indifferent health. The luggage belongs to Broadbent, who enters
after the valet. He pulls off his overcoat and hangs it with his
hat on the stand. Then he comes to the writing table and looks
through the letters which are waiting for him. He is a robust,
full-blooded, energetic man in the prime of life, sometimes eager
and credulous, sometimes shrewd and roguish, sometimes
portentously solemn, sometimes jolly and impetuous, always
buoyant and irresistible, mostly likeable, and enormously absurd
in his most earnest moments. He bursts open his letters with his
thumb, and glances through them, flinging the envelopes about the
floor with reckless untidiness whilst he talks to the valet.

BROADBENT [calling] Hodson.

HODSON [in the bedroom] Yes sir.

BROADBENT. Don't unpack. Just take out the things I've worn; and
put in clean things.