they produce books or newspapers, and read during the solemn meal. It
is as well to watch these men and take note of them. Many of them are
grey-headed. No one of them is young. But they are beginners, mere
apprentices, at a very difficult trade, and in the days to come they
will have the making of the history of Europe. For these men are
attaches and secretaries of embassies. They will talk to you in almost
any European tongue you may select, but they are not communicative
persons.

During the winter--the gay season at The Hague--there are usually a
certain number of residents in the hotel. At the time with which we are
dealing, Mrs. Vansittart was staying there, alone with her maid. Mrs.
Vansittart was in the habit of dining at the small table near the
stove--a gorgeous erection of steel and brass, which stands nearly in
the centre of the smaller dining-room used in winter. Mrs. Vansittart
seemed, moreover, to be quite at home in the hotel, and exchanged bows
with a few of the gentlemen of the corps diplomatique. She was a
graceful, dark-haired woman, with deep brown eyes that looked upon the
world without much interest. This was not, one felt, a woman to lavish
her attention or her thoughts upon a toy spaniel, as do so many ladies
travelling alone with their maids in Continental hotels. Perhaps this
woman of thirty-five years or so preferred to be frankly bored, rather
than set up for herself a shivering four-legged object in life. Perhaps
she was not bored at all. One never knows. The gentlemen from the
embassies glanced at her over their books or their newspapers, and
wondered who and what she might be. They knew, at all events, that she
took no interest in those affairs of the great world which rumble on
night and day without rest, with spasmodic bursts of clumsy haste, and
with a never-failing possibility of surprise in their movements. This
was no political woman, whatever else she might be. She would talk in