policeman," his face
lights up and so it would if you said "I saw a dog," or a cat, or a
donkey-cart. To him policemen and dogs and cats and donkey-carts are
always just about to do something dramatic or absurd or unexpected. Nor
is he discouraged by unfailing regularity in their behaviour. Faith is
"the evidence of things not seen."

And then, too, he is so very welcoming. Not, of course, that he makes
you feel you are the only person in the world because a world with only
one other person in it would be inconceivably horrible to him, but he
does make you quite sure that he is most frightfully glad to see
you--all the gladder because it is such a surprise. Delancey always
makes a point of being surprised. Also, though he is invariably in a
hurry--being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life--he as
invariably turns round and walks with you, in your direction, to
convince himself that having met you in Jermyn Street is an altogether
unexpected and delightful adventure. And he never feels, as I always do,
that a five minutes' conversation is a stupid, embarrassing thing, too
long for mere civility and too short for anything else. The five minutes
are filled to the brim and off he rushes again, leaving me just a little
more tired and leisurely from the contact. Delancey is the life and soul
of a party--or perhaps I should say the life and body. He likes eating
and drinking and talking to women and talking to men and smoking and
telling a story. And if he does address his neighbour a little as if she
were a meeting at a bye-election, open air, he at any rate never
addresses her as if she were a duty and no one had ever wanted to kiss
her.

To Delancey all women have had lovers and husbands and children and
religious conversions and railway accidents. Old maids and clergymen's
wives adore him.

I don't know what it was that made him write originally. Perhaps it was
his name--Delancey Woburn sounds like the author--or the hero--of a
serial. Or it may have been that his exuberant desire for
self-expression had burst through the four walls of practical
professions. He had, I believe, considered the stage and the church.
Journalism would have seemed to me the obvious outlet but he preferred
literature. "Creation is such _fun_," he would explain, beaming. And, of
course, he was tremendously successful. Delancey was designed on a
pattern of success.

That was one of the obvious defects I was talking about. Delancey