Lord Hugh unfolded the slip of paper, read it, smiled very boyishly all over his face, and, folding it up again, slowly turned his head and looked back towards his brother.
The smile they exchanged was a Cecilian biography.

One saw in the light of that instant and whole-hearted smile the danger of a keen sense of ironical humour.

Both these men have the making of creative fanatics; in both of them there is an intense moral earnestness and in both great intellectual power; but nature has mixed up with these gifts, which were intended for mankind, a drollery of spirit, only amusing in the confidence of private life which they have allowed to weaken their sincerities.

Humanity may be thankful that St.Paul was without a sense of humour.
During the war, as Minister of Blockade, Lord Robert Cecil rendered services of the greatest magnitude to his countrymen: he kept Sweden out of the war when the Russian Foreign Office could hardly breathe for anxiety on this point, and at a time when many British newspapers were doing their best to facilitate the great desire of Germany to march an army through Sweden and Finland to the thus easily reached Russian capital.

His work, too, at the Peace Conference in Paris entitles him to the gratitude of the nation: he kept the idea of the League of Nations alive in an atmosphere that was charged with war.