Miss Churchill turned swiftly, almost apprehensively, toward him. She uttered my name and he gave the slightest of starts of annoyance--a start that meant, "Why wasn't I warned before?" This irritated me; I knew well enough what were his relations with de Mersch, and the man took me for a little eavesdropper, I suppose. His attitudes were rather grotesque, of the sort that would pass in a person of his eminence. He stuck his eye-glasses on the end of his nose, looked at me short-sightedly, took them off and looked again. He had the air of looking down from an immense height--of needing a telescope. "Oh, ah ... Mrs. Granger's son, I presume.... I wasn't aware...." The hesitation of his manner made me feel as if we never should get anywhere--not for years and years. "No," I said, rather brusquely, "I'm only from the _Hour_." He thought me one of Fox's messengers then, said that Fox might have written: "Have saved you the trouble, I mean ... or...." He had the air of wishing to be amiable, of wishing, even, to please me by proving that he was aware of my identity. "Oh," I said, a little loftily, "I haven't any message, I've only come to interview you." An expression of dismay sharpened the lines of his face. "To...." he began, "but I've never allowed--" He recovered himself sharply, and set the glasses vigorously on his nose; at last he had found the right track. "Oh, I remember now," he said, "I hadn't looked at it in that way." The whole thing grated on my self-love and I became, in a contained way, furiously angry. I was impressed with the idea that the man was only a puppet in the hands of Fox and de Mersch, and that lot. And he gave himself these airs of enormous distance. I, at any rate, was clean-handed in the matter; I hadn't any axe to grind. "Ah, yes," he said, hastily, "you are to draw my portrait--as Fox put it. He sent me your Jenkins sketch. I read it--it struck a very nice note. And so--." He sat himself down on a preposterously low chair, his knees on a level with his chin. I muttered that I feared he would find the process a bore. "Not more for me than for you," he answered, seriously--"one has to do these things." "Why, yes," I echoed, "one has to do these things." It struck me that he regretted it--regretted it intensely; that he attached a bitter meaning to the words. "And ... what is the procedure?" he asked, after a pause. "I am new to the sort of thing." He had the air, I thought, of talking to some respectable tradesman that one calls in only when one is _in extremis_--to a distinguished pawnbroker, a man quite at the top of a tree of inferior timber. "Oh, for the matter of that, so am I," I answered. "I'm supposed to get your atmosphere, as Callan put it." "Indeed," he answered, absently, and then, after a pause, "You know Callan?" I was afraid I should fall in his estimation. "One has to do these things," I said; "I've just been getting his atmosphere."