Vernon Prideaux, having given his assistance to the Minister in the matter of the third clause of the new Clergymen's Babies Instruction, left the Minister and the deputation together and returned to his room via the Propaganda Branch, which he visited in order to ask Miss Grammont to dine with him that evening. He and Kitty Grammont had known one another for some years. They had begun at Cambridge, where Prideaux had been two years the senior, and had kept up an intermittent friendship ever since, which had, since their association in the Ministry, grown into intimacy. Prideaux found Kitty writing a pamphlet. She was rather good at this form of literature, having a concise and clear-cut style and an instinct for stopping on the right word. Some pamphleteers have not this art: they add a sentence or two more, and undo their effect. The pamphlet on which Miss Grammont was at this moment engaged was intended for the perusal of the working woman, and bore the conversational title, "The Nation takes an interest in Your Affairs: will You not take an interest in the Affairs of the Nation?" Which, as Miss Grammont observed, took rather a long time to say, but may have been worth it. "Dine with you? I'll be charmed. Where and when?" "My rooms, eight o'clock. I've got my parents and the Minister coming." "Oh, the Minister." "Do you mind?" "No, I'm proud to meet him. I've never yet met him over food, so to speak, only officially. I admire our Chester more every day he lives, don't you? Nature made him and then broke the die." "Wonderful man," Prideaux agreed. "Extraordinary being.... A happy touch with bishops, too. Picked that up in the home, no doubt; his father's one. _Liking's_ another thing, of course.... By the way, do you know what his category is? However, this is gossip. I must get back and discover what's the latest perpetration of my new secretary. See you to-night, then."