tical ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all
seemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor. I
hadn't had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great man
at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had
addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself
how effectively this privilege had supposed itself to prepare him for the
career on which my friend appeared now to have embarked. I remember too
making up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose
in impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of
mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a
revealing spark. He accepted without a question both his fever and his
chill, and the only thing he touched with judgment was this convenience
of my friendship. He doubtless told me his simple story, but the matter
comes back in a kind of sense of my being rather the mouthpiece, of my
having had to put it together for him. He took it from me in this form
without a groan, and I gave it him quite as it came; he took it again and
again, spending his odd half-hours with me as if for the very purpose of
learning how idiotically he was in love. He told me I made him see
things: to begin with, hadn't I first made him see Flora Saunt? I wanted
him to give her up and lucidly informed him why; on which he never
protested nor contradicted, never was even so alembicated as to declare
just for the sake of the point that he wouldn't. He simply and
pointlessly didn't, and when at the end of three months I asked him what
was the use of talking with such a fellow his nearest approach to a
justification was to say that what made him want to help her was just the
deficiencies I dwelt on. I could only reply without gross developments:
"Oh if you're as sorry for her as that!" I too was nearly as sorry for
her as that, but it only led me to be sorrier still for other victims of
this compassion. With Dawling as with me the compassion was at first in
excess of any visible motive; so that when eventually the motive was
supplied each could to a certain extent compliment the other on the
fineness of his foresight.

After he had begun to haunt my studio Miss Saunt quite gave it up, and I
finally learned that she accused me of conspiring with him to put
pressure on her to marry him. She didn't know I would take it that way,
else she would never have brought him to see