Mr Strummery, the Premier, did not occupy the official residence provided for him. Mrs Strummery, an excellent lady who had once been heard to remark that she could never understand why her husband was called _Prime Minister_ when he was not a _minister_ at all, flatly declared that the work of cleaning the windows alone of the house in Downing Street put it out of the question. Even Mr Strummery, who, among his political associates, was reported to have rather exalted ideas of the dignity of his position, came to the conclusion, after fully considering the residence from every standpoint, that he might not feel really at home there. It was therefore let, furnished, to an American lady who engineered wealthy _débutantes_ from her native land into "the best" English society, and the Strummerys found more congenial surroundings in Brandenburg Place. There, within a convenient distance of the Hampstead Road and other choice shopping centres, Mrs Strummery, like the wife of another eminent statesman whose statue stood almost within sight of her bedroom windows, was able to indulge in her amiable foible for cheap marketing. And if the two ladies had this in common, the points of resemblance between their respective lords (the moral side excluded) might be multiplied many-fold, for no phrase put into Mr Strummery's mouth could epigrammatise his point of view more concisely than Fox's inopportune toast, "Our Sovereign: the People." History's dispassionate comment was that the sentiment which lost the abler man his Privy Councillorship in his day, gained for the other a Premiership a century later.
"One thing that gets me is why no one ever seems to take any notice of us when we have a Council on," remarked the President of the Board of Education with an involuntary plaint in his voice. He was standing on the balcony outside the large front room on Mr Strummery's first floor--a room which boasted the noble proportions of a _salon_, and possibly served as one in Georgian days. Certainly Brandenburg Place did not present a spectacle of fluttering animation at the prospect of seeing the great ones of the land assembling within its bounds. At one end of the thoroughfare a milkman was going from area to area with a prolonged melancholy cry more suggestive of Stoke Poges churchyard than of any other spot on earth; at the opposite end a grocer's errand boy, with basket resourcefully inverted upon his head, had sunk down by the railings to sip the nectar from a few more pages of "Iroquois Ike's Last Hope; or, The Phantom Cow-Puncher's Bride." Midway between the two a cat, in the act of crossing the road, had stopped to twitch a forepaw with that air of imperturbable deliberateness in its movements that no other created thing can ever succeed in attaining. In a house opposite some one was rattling off the exhilarating strains of "Humming Ephraim," but even when a hansom cab and two four-wheelers drove up in quick succession to the Premier's door, no one betrayed curiosity to the extent of looking out of the window. The Minister of Education noted these things as he stood on the balcony, and possibly he felt another phase of the gratitude of men that often left Mr Wordsworth mourning. "I can remember the time when crowds used to wait hours in the rain along Downing Street--our people, too--to catch a sight of Estair or Nettlebury. I won't exactly say that it annoys me, because I've seen too much of the hollowness of things for that, but it certainly is rummy why it should be so."