y their example, but rather that the stories don't tally with my own
experience. Often, when I tire of a novel, I ask myself why? And the
answer is, This isn't the way at all! People aren't _like_ that. Love
isn't like that either. While as for hate, there is very little of it in
the world, I fancy, but rather ill-temper and selfishness and
indifference. These make for futility, just as our uncertainty of
ambition does. We grope.

"You may imagine that I was not justified in saying in so many words
that I was no gentleman, that I was prejudicing myself in that man's
eyes, wantonly. I don't defend it altogether, I was eager at the time,
full of the radical philosophy of the period, anxious to stand on my own
feet. I saw men in the flat, so to speak. Men _and_ women. They were
decorative forms rather than souls like myself. My girl had been like
that, too, when I first saw her, a decorative form, exquisite, pathetic,
entrancing. But the magic of the business was that slowly she was
emerging from among those figures of two dimensions and coming to sit
beside me, a companion. I had never had one before. There might never
have been such a thing happen before to anybody, it seemed so strange
and so astonishingly fortunate! For years I didn't get used to it. And
if I am, in a way, accustomed to the idea now, it is only the occasional
veiling of a vision, a breathing on the glass, as it were. At sea it
will come upon me like a dream of misfortune--if we had never met,
if--if--if! Who can tell?

"Mr. Hank and Rebecca were sitting in the little room upstairs one
evening when I came in for Rosa and I told them my adventures at the
Hotel Robinson. They were drinking whisky, I remember, and talking
together in a low tone, like conspirators. Rebecca laughed.

"'Ah!' said she. 'I scared him that time, eh, Oscar?'

"'You!' he answered in good-humoured contempt. 'You made a big mistake
there, my dear.'

"'Well,' she retorted. 'And who was it gave me the tip? Who was it said
that English doctor was worth trying, eh?'

"'I did,' said Oscar, looking at me and winking, 'but I didn't tell you
to go and make a fool of yourself and spoil the game.'

"'Easy to say that after,' she grumbled, and became aware of me looking
at both of them in great perplexity.

"'_Non capisce_', she added to her husband.

"'The doctor mentioned a painful incident,' I remarked.

"'The devil he did!' they ejaculated, looking at me in astonishment, and
Re