P.'s custom
to say, during dinner, that on the following day he would ride, drive,
or walk with such a one or such a one, naming him; and the victim--a
term frequently used with a good deal of surprisingly frank enjoyment by
J. P. himself--had often to work well into the night preparing material
for conversation.
I saw something of what this preparation meant before I left the villa
after my first meeting with J. P. Two of the secretaries said they would
go over to Monte Carlo, and they asked me to go with them; but I
declined, preferring to remain behind for a chat with one of the
secretaries, Mr. Norman G. Thwaites, an Englishman, who was secretary in
a more technical sense than any of the rest of us, for he was a
shorthand writer and did most of J. P.'s correspondence.
After the others had gone he showed me a table in the entrance hall of
the villa, on which was a big pile of mail just arrived from London. It
included a great number of newspapers and weeklies, several copies of
each. There were The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The
Morning Post, The Daily News, The Westminster Gazette, Truth, The
Spectator, The Saturday Review, The Nation, The Outlook, and some other
London publications, as well as the Paris editions of the New York
Herald and The Daily Mail.
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