Nothing pleases him for a longer spell than desultory conversation with someone who is content to listen, or with someone who brings news of electoral chances.

Of course he is a tired man, but his fatigue is not only physical.

He mounted up in youth with wings like an eagle, in manhood he was able to run without weariness, but the first years of age find him unable to walk without faintness--the supreme test of character.

If he had been able to keep the wings of his youth I think he might have been almost the greatest man of British history.

But luxury has invaded, and cynicism; and now a cigar in the depths of an easy-chair, with Miss Megan Lloyd George on the arm, and a clever politician on the opposite side of the hearth, this is pleasanter than any poetic vapourings about the millennium.
If only he could rise from that destroying chair, if only he could fling off his vulgar friendships, if only he could trust himself to his vision, if only he could believe once again passionately in truth, and justice, and goodness, and the soul of the British people! One wonders if the angels in heaven will ever forgive his silence at a time when the famished children of Austria, many of them born with no bones, were dying like flies at the shrivelled breasts of their starving mothers.