“It meant too much to him. But of course his ideas were splendid. You know it is one of my hopes to get some sort of book done, explaining his ideas. He would never write. He despised it—unreasonably. A real thing done, he said, was better than a thousand books. Nobody read books, he said, but women, parsons and idle people. But there must be books. And I want one. Something a little more real than the ordinary official biography.... I have thought of young Leighton, the secretary of the Commission. He seems thoroughly intelligent and sympathetic and really anxious to reconcile Richmond’s views with those of the big business men on the Committee. He might do.... Or perhaps I might be able to persuade two or three people to write down their impressions of him. A sort of memorial volume.... But he was shy of friends. There was no man he talked to very intimately about his ideas unless it was to you... I wish I had the writer’s gift, doctor.”
§ 7
It was on the second afternoon that Lady Hardy summoned Dr. Martineau by telephone. “Something rather disagreeable,” she said. “If you could spare the time. If you could come round.
“It is frightfully distressing,” she said when he got round to her, and for a time she could tell him nothing more. She was having tea and she
