You have met Sir Appleton Deepe in this house. You have met him more than once and you have always been too dear and too discreet to ask, to hint, to raise an eyebrow in mild wonder that I should be _liée_ with such a man. _Of his kind_ I believe he has no rival. As a mere boy he was sent out to one of the Chinese branches of the business; and by sheer hard work, by studying the natives and learning their requirements he had, before he was forty, built up the trade of his firm to its present gigantic dimensions. Now he is senior partner and a millionaire many times over, with patronage beyond one's wildest dreams. Curious! These "merchant princes" are all the same--never content to stick to their business, always looking for fresh worlds to conquer. I met Sir Appleton--he was plain Mr. Deepe then--in the early days of the war; and, though any _intimacy_ was out of the question, I felt that he was a man to keep one's eye on for the days when the war would be over and all our boys would be wondering what to do next. He had great ideas then of going into politics--something that Lady Maitland let fall had started the train, and he was convinced that the business man had the world at his feet. (I could not help wondering whether she hoped to exploit him on behalf of that _worthless_ youngest boy of hers, the one who evaded military service by _hiding_ in one of the government offices.) "No, Mr. Deepe," I said. "To use one of your own phrases, you have missed your market. The business men have got in before you." And, goodness me, in those days, Whitehall was like a foreign capital! Even the ministers were unheard-of, and every one seemed to be a mining magnate or a shipping magnate or a railway magnate or the keeper of a shop... If one had a favour to ask, one quite literally did not know whom to approach. And they were always changing... "No, Mr. Deepe," I said, "some enter society through politics, others enter politics through society; but no man ever rose to the top of the political tree--_and stayed there_--without _backing_"... And, so far as I could, I shewed him how it should be done and who were the people he must get to know. _Quite_ methodically I set him to work; and I really took a great deal of trouble about him. Connie Maitland has the sublime assurance to pretend that _she_ got him his knighthood, but on a point like that Sir Appleton himself is surely the most reliable witness... I helped him in a hundred ways; he is quite reasonably well-known now...