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Black Suit. This time, dressed in a black sackcloth suit instead of morning clothes, his hair a little thinner, he spoke from a sheaf of typewritten notes. His voice sounded weak in the big chamber. But his confidence, and the bite and fluency acquired in 40 years of Parliamentary debate, were still with him. Time after time he brought roars of applause from his audience as he reviewed the state of the war, outlined and defended the Allied strategy. He pledged, as eyes watched Happy Chandler, that Britain will fight on against Japan "while blood flows through our veins," declared the urgent need of "immediate and effective aid to China."
When it was over he received a final ovation and bowed repeatedly to his onetime sovereign. The departing Duke and Duchess received a still greater one, the greatest applause of the day.
Onions and the People. The Prime Minister was whisked off to a flower-banked table in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee room for a lunch with the leaders of Congress. For more than an hour, after eating his plate whistle-clean and chomping his onions with special relish, he answered Congressional questions fully and frankly. Waiting newsmen gawked as he emerged from the room, grinned, dropped his eight-inch cigar on the butt-strewn floor, jauntily picked it up and thrust it back in his teeth.
Outside, the patient crowd behind the ropes had swelled to 5,000. "Why!" cried the great politician, "Look at all those people waiting to see me. I must tip my hat to them." Stumping across the plaza, he walked a dozen steps up & down the middle of the street, waving his hat, lifting his fingers in another V. At last, to his jittery guardians' immense relief, he hopped into a waiting limousine and disappeared toward the White House.
Nowhere in his speech had the Prime Minister mentioned Senator Chandler by name. But at one point, when he observed that "Lots of people can make good plans for winning the war if they have not got to carry them out," Happy's face was seen to flush beet-red.