rd
Octon keeping quiet? Or if quiet perforce, why did he seem placid,
content, and, contrary to all expectation of him, amiably trustful?

One evening I availed myself of his invitation--Jenny did not always bid
me to dinner, and sometimes I was lonely even as he was--and walked down
to Hatcham Ford. Passing Ivydene, I was interested to observe lights in
the window, though it was nine o'clock at night. Presumably friend
Nelson Powers did not merely use the place as his office (Cartmell's
protest had, of course, not produced the smallest effect on Jenny--my
own having failed, I should have been annoyed if it had), but was
established there with his family. Certainly Jenny did not always
procrastinate--she seemed to delay least when the transaction was most
doubtful! But I had come to accept Powers's position as one of her
freaks and, save for a rather sour amusement, thought at the moment
little more about him.

That night--it seems strange to say it, but it expresses my inmost
feelings--I made friends with Leonard Octon; before I had been merely
interested, amused, and exasperated in turn. He chose to remove from me
the ban which he laid on and maintained over most of his
fellow-creatures--from no merit of my own, as I believe, but because I
stood near to Jenny; or, if I can claim any part in the matter, because
of a certain openness of mind which, as he was good enough to declare,
existed in me. This was to say no more than that, to a certain and
limited extent, I agreed with some of his prejudices--his own openness
of mind consisting mainly in a hatred of the views and opinions of most
other people. I was a very pale copy of him. Things toward which my
meditations and my temper bred in me a degree of indifference he frankly
and cordially hated. Respectability may be chosen as the word to sum
them up; if I questioned its merits, he hated and damned it utterly.
This was one of the things which interested and amused--and, when it
issued in rudeness to Lady Aspenick, also exasperated. It was not for
this that I made friends with him.

"When I saw that woman owning that road--coming along in her twopenny
glory, with her flunkeys to whistle me out of the way--she looked at me
herself, too, mind you, and without a gleam of recognition--I got angry.
Not even the public road, mind you! She was a guest as I was."

"But you weren't driving a tandem with a restive leader."

"And oughtn't she to apologize for driving restive