only drifting through life, eating what came in his way, believing
what came in his way, doing without any vigor what came in his way,
but that into life also he had drifted. You could not believe him
the child of pride and high resolve, or of any splendid passion of
love. He had just HAPPENED. . . But we all happened then. Why am
I taking this tone over this poor little curate in particular?

"Hello!" he said, with an assumption of friendly ease. "Haven't
seen you for weeks! Come in and have a gossip."

An invitation from the drawing-room lodger was in the nature of a
command. I would have liked very greatly to have refused it, never
was invitation more inopportune, but I had not the wit to think
of an excuse. "All right," I said awkwardly, and he held the door
open for me.

"I'd be very glad if you would," he amplified. "One doesn't get
much opportunity of intelligent talk in this parish."

What the devil was he up to, was my secret preoccupation. He fussed
about me with a nervous hospitality, talking in jumpy fragments,
rubbing his hands together, and taking peeps at me over and round
his glasses. As I sat down in his leather-covered armchair, I had
an odd memory of the one in the Clayton dentist's operating-room--I
know not why.

"They're going to give us trouble in the North Sea, it seems," he
remarked with a sort of innocent zest. "I'm glad they mean fighting."

There was an air of culture about his room that always cowed me,
and that made me constrained even on this occasion. The table under
the window was littered with photographic material and the later
albums of his continental souvenirs, and on the American cloth
trimmed shelves that filled the recesses on either side of the
fireplace were what I used to think in those days a quite incredible
number of books--perhaps eight hundred altogether, including
the reverend gentleman's photograph albums and college and school
text-books. This suggestion of learning was enforced by the
little wooden shield bearing a college coat-of-arms that hung over
the looking-glass, and by a photograph of Mr. Gabbitas in cap and
gown in an Oxford frame that adorned the opposite wall. And in the
middle of that wall stood his writing-desk, which I knew to have
pigeon-holes when it was open, and which made him seem not merely
cultured but literary. At that he wrote sermons, composing them
himself!

"Yes," he said, taking possession of the hearthrug, "the war had
to come so