It seemed a little cruel that Churchill should talk in that way without meaning a word of it--as if the words were a polite formality.
"Nothing would delight me more," I answered, and added, "nothing in the world." He asked me if I had seen such and such a picture, talked of artists, and praised this and that man very fittingly, but with a certain timidity--a timidity that lured me back to my normally overbearing frame of mind.

In such matters I was used to hearing my own voice.

I could talk a man down, and, with a feeling of the unfitness of things, I talked Churchill down.

The position, even then, struck me as gently humorous.

It was as if some infinitely small animal were bullying some colossus among the beasts.