each panel had a bunch of flowers tied with interminable ribbons in
the centre. You don't like that sort of thing? Well, it is indigenous
there, anyway, and you can't put shiny dadoes and humorous borders on a
forty-foot wall, can you?

"And yet, you know, I saw in a moment, before I had opened my mouth,
what lay at the back of all this. I could see that was only a variation
of the traditional hermit's cave, a modern hole in a marble cliff. This
tall, high-shouldered man with his spade-shaped beard and ragged smoking
jacket, the cotton wool oozing from the quilting and the pockets burst
at the corners, had recluse written all over him. He walked over the
half dozen rugs that lay between the door and his encampment behind the
table and left me forlorn, twiddling my hat and pulling at my coat,
somewhere in outer darkness. He was nervous, yet anxious to show he was
at ease. I had disturbed him. Once he looked behind him at a door with a
black curtain before it, as though he contemplated flight to his
bedroom. Suddenly he started off on a journey into the darkness and
returned with a chair, a gilt thing with a rounded knob of upholstery
for a seat. And he asked me gently to sit down.

"A recluse! I had that idea in my mind all the time I was telling him my
story, as I am telling it to you, as far as it concerned my girl, and I
watched him with a certain abstract curiosity, as well as a very lively
anxiety. For I couldn't think how he came into it. In rapid succession I
thought of the possibilities. In a novel, no doubt, he would be her
father or a wicked uncle. Or perhaps he had, in a professional capacity,
we may say, concocted some villainy! But then his flag wouldn't be P or
any other letter. Villains don't carry on the humdrum business of
attending ships in port for a lump sum down. Yes, as I told him my story
I was wondering what his was. And I was conscious also that I was
increasing my experience. Here was a recluse. They do not grow on
bushes. It stands to reason a young man will not come across many. A
young man grows so accustomed to reading about things nowadays that he
may quite possibly never miss the actual experience. I could not do
that. I have always had some sort of touchstone by which I could keep a
hold on the difference between reality and mere imagination. There were
many things, common things if you like, which I had never experienced,
and I meant to experience them. Nothing dismayed me. I had in me a