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He didn’t.

She told him briefly: Ole Man Benson was broke.

The Prime Minister remembered the explosion of Popocatapetl: he had vaguely connected the news with something at the time: now he knew what it was. He looked extremely grave. And when Mary went on to tell him that Mrs. Demaine had only £1500 he looked graver still.

“There isn’t anything of a big sort going just now, Mary,” he said in quite another tone. But he was thinking his clearest. “I don’t know him as well as you do,” he added. “Can he do anything?”

“No,” said Mary Smith decidedly, “he can’t. But he’d go well in harness.”

The Prime Minister seemed to live more actively as he considered the problem. The warm air, the scent of clothes and flowers suited him well.

The trouble with his left lung which had so endeared him to his fellow-citizens, he felt far less keenly in the beginning of a warm spring than at any other time, and evenings such as this rewarded him for the sacrifice he made every winter to his duty and to England. Of the four years during which he had held the highest of human offices he had spent but one winter on the Riviera, and though it had been necessary in one year to forego an Autumn session, such a session had not in the other three years delayed the meeting of Parliament beyond the end of February. His youth stood him in good stead during this ordeal; but there were those (and they were they who loved him most) who looked with anxiety upon the frail form and thought, although they dared not say, that the years were slipping by and that what a man could do with impunity when still upon the right side of fifty, would become another matter when his fifty-fifth year was passed.... There was of course always the hope of opposition and its leisure.... The Broadening of the Streets Bill had roused a tempest of Party passion.... He had already been publicly stoned in the North.... But no matter; for the moment the Prime Minister was full of appreciation, and for his cousin’s purposes in the kindliest of moods.