alking as he had not done since his
last symposium with Ned Winsett. The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had
been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for
Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake
Leman. Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, who
had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he
went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Riviere added with
simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.

It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without
one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a man
of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called
him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense
expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his
animation.

His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and
it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an
insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism,
then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length--after
other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into
tutoring English youths in Switzerland. Before that, however, he had
lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised by
Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a
dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother's
house. He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious
(having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was
apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation, in
fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned
Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who
loved ideas need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that love
that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of
vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so
richly in his poverty.

"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's
intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation,
one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned
journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private
secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one
preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one