Most
secretaries detested their chiefs, and wished to be anything but
useful. At the St. James's Club, to which the Minister's son
could go only as an invited guest, the most instructive
conversation he ever heard among the young men of his own age who
hung about the tables, more helpless than himself, was: "Quel
chien de pays!" or, "Que tu es beau aujourd'hui, mon cher!" No
one wanted to discuss affairs; still less to give or get
information. That was the affair of their chiefs, who were also
slow to assume work not specially ordered from their Courts. If
the American Minister was in trouble to-day, the Russian
Ambassador was in trouble yesterday, and the Frenchman would be
in trouble to-morrow. It would all come in the day's work. There
was nothing professional in worry. Empires were always tumbling
to pieces and diplomats were always picking them up.
This was his whole diplomatic education, except that he found
rich veins of jealousy running between every chief and his staff.
His social education was more barren still, and more trying to
his vanity. His little mistakes in etiquette or address made him
writhe with torture. He never forgot the first two or three
social functions he attended: one an afternoon at Miss Burdett
Coutts's in Stratton Place, where he hid himself in the embrasure
of a window and hoped that no one noticed him; another was a
garden-party given by the old anti-slavery Duchess Dowager of
Sutherland at Chiswick, where the American Minister and Mrs.
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