e to eat jellied consomme as long as I live without
connecting it with the Saurian Period! I remember that those quaint
and apparently highly important beasts lasted well into our
guinea-chick and lettuce-hearts, and I can see him now, his eager,
dark face all lighted with enthusiasm while he spread mayonnaise
neatly over the crimson quarters of tomato on his plate, and made
short nervous mouthfuls, in order to talk the better. Half amused,
half interested I listened, trying to place the fellow, but for the
life of me I could not. Was he a scientist, a lecturer, a magazine
writer, a schoolmaster? We finished with some Port du Salut and
Bar-le-duc--an admitted weakness of mine--and I had decided to
regularly pump him and find out his name without his guessing my game,
when he began as I supposed, to help me out.

"Heavens!" he said with compunction, "you'll think me an awful bore,
Jerrolds, but I've been more or less practising on you, haven't I? But
you'll remember, perhaps, this used to be a sort of hobby of mine, and
I work it into shape nowadays for a young men's club I'm running."

I yawned and lit a cigar and we sipped our coffee in silence. The
plates rattled around us, the curacoa in my tiny glass smelled sweet
and strong, everything was natural, easy, well fed and well groomed
(as the phrase goes now) about me, the day and hour were like any
other; and yet from that moment on my life was never to be quite the
same, for surprise and change were hurrying toward me, and the man
opposite--how curiously!--was to be drawn into the wide net that fate
had sunk for me and must have even then been preparing to draw
smoothly and effectively to the surface.

We think, when we are young, that we live alone. I recall, as a boy of
twenty, certain hot-headed, despairing midnight walks when the horror
of my hopeless, unapproachable, unreachable identity surged over me in
melancholy waves. Heavens! I would have plunged into a monastery if I
had believed that any sort of prayer and fasting could bring me
close--really close--to God; for to any human creature, I had learned,
I could never be close. After that, we grow into that curious stage of
irresponsibility which we deduce from this loneliness, and distress
our patient relatives with windy explanations of "matters that concern
ourselves alone." And later still, if we have the right kind of women
about us, some faint idea of the twisted net we weave--you and I and
the other f