r our dark figures shuffling
softly through the snow. And then a long eleven-hour day.

XXV

I have occasionally mentioned my friend the Second. A keen,
dark-skinned, clean-shaven face, with small blue eyes and regular
white teeth. There are no flies on him. His is one of those minds
which can grasp every detail of a profession and yet remain very
ignorant indeed, a mind which travel has made broader--and shallower.
He is a clever, courteous, skilful, well-bred, narrow-minded
Broad-Churchman. He is a total abstainer, a non-smoker, and a
frequenter of houses of fair reception. If anomaly can go further, I
can declare to you that he is engaged to a clergyman's daughter. When
he is angered, his face grows as thin as a razor, the small blue eyes
diminish to glittering points, and the small white teeth close like a
vise. It is then that I am sorry for the clergyman's daughter. We do
not understand each other, I fear, because I am so unsentimental. He
believes in unpractical things like Money, Success, Empire, Home Life,
Football, and Wales for ever. How can a man who puts faith in such
visionary matters understand one who builds on the eternal and
immovable bedrock of literature and art? He has sober dreams of
following in his father's steps and making a fortune for himself, and
he considers me weak in the head when I explain that I have made _my_
wealth and am now enjoying it. Would he _ever_ understand, I wonder?

"_Yes, there are some from whom our Lady flies,
Whose dull, dead souls, rise not at her command,
And who, in blindness, press back from their eyes
'The light that never was on sea or land._'"

In fact, I should say he is one of those same mechanicians of whom I
spoke, in whose lives literature will have no place, and the desire
for a private harem supplant the _grande passion_. This may sound
absurd when one remembers their love of home; but I speak with
knowledge. It is easy enough to make a man out to be a patriot, or a
humanitarian, or a home-lover, if you pick and choose from his
complicated mentality just what suits that particular label. To know a
man as he is, you must be shipmates with him, quarrel with him, mess
with him week after week until you are sick of the sight of him. Then,
if you are sufficiently sensitive to personality, you will divine his
spiritual bedrock beneath all the superimposed recencies, and you will
know whether he be "a mere phosphatous prop of f