and saw the other man in brown standing at the edge of the
pavement and regarding him with a very curious expression of face.

There came into Mr. Hoopdriver's head the curious problem whether he was
to be regarded as a nuisance haunting these people, or whether they were
to be regarded as a nuisance haunting him. He abandoned the solution at
last in despair, quite unable to decide upon the course he should take
at the next encounter, whether he should scowl savagely at the couple or
assume an attitude eloquent of apology and propitiation.

X. THE IMAGININGS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER'S HEART

Mr. Hoopdriver was (in the days of this story) a poet, though he had
never written a line of verse. Or perhaps romancer will describe him
better. Like I know not how many of those who do the fetching and
carrying of life,--a great number of them certainly,--his real life was
absolutely uninteresting, and if he had faced it as realistically as
such people do in Mr. Gissing's novels, he would probably have come by
way of drink to suicide in the course of a year. But that was just what
he had the natural wisdom not to do. On the contrary, he was always
decorating his existence with imaginative tags, hopes, and poses,
deliberate and yet quite effectual self-deceptions; his experiences were
mere material for a romantic superstructure. If some power had given
Hoopdriver the 'giftie' Burns invoked, 'to see oursels as ithers see
us,' he would probably have given it away to some one else at the very
earliest opportunity. His entire life, you must understand, was not a
continuous romance, but a series of short stories linked only by the
general resemblance of their hero, a brown-haired young fellow commonly,
with blue eyes and a fair moustache, graceful rather than strong, sharp
and resolute rather than clever (cp., as the scientific books say,
p. 2). Invariably this person possessed an iron will. The stories
fluctuated indefinitely. The smoking of a cigarette converted
Hoopdriver's hero into something entirely worldly, subtly rakish, with a
humorous twinkle in the eye and some gallant sinning in the background.
You should have seen Mr. Hoopdriver promenading the brilliant gardens at
Earl's Court on an early-closing night. His meaning glances! (I dare not
give the meaning.) Such an influence as the eloquence of a revivalist
preacher would suffice to divert the story into absolutely different
channels, make him a white-soured hero, a man still