shing on it not only in the
financial sense, but also in that of character. It was said that he knew
as many life histories as a doctor or a priest, and generally the more
dramatic ones. The experience had clearly made him cynical, but tolerant
also, and human, with a tendency, as far as he was personally concerned,
to being morally strait-laced. He had seen so much of the picturesque
side of life that he could appreciate the prosaic, which, in Chip's
explanation, was why he could stand by Mrs. Bland. Other people's
surfeits of champagne and ortolans had assured his own taste for plain
roast beef. But he himself ordered the porcelain on which his simple
fare was served, and the wines by which it was accompanied, drunk from
fine old Irish or Bohemian glass.

Chip took this in by degrees. His first acquaintance with a man who was
to exercise some influence on his future was purely professional. He had
gone to him as an offset to Aunt Emily. If the results of this move were
indirect--since Aunt Emily had won the victory--they became apparent in
time. They became apparent when in Chip's bruised heart, where
everything healthy seemed to have been stunned, a slight curiosity began
to awaken concerning his new friend's personality.

He came to consider him a friend by accident--the accident of a club,
where, finding themselves sitting down to dine at the same moment, they
had taken the same table. Primarily, it was an opportunity to adjust
some loose ends of Chip's domestic affairs; incidentally, they stumbled
on a common hobby in Victorian English politics. There was no subject on
which Emery Bland was better informed, with a learning that covered the
whole long stretch from Lord Melbourne to Lord Salisbury, and which he
could garnish with anecdote _ad libitum_. It was a kind of conversation
of which Chip, who had been brought up partly in England, rarely got a
taste in New York, and for which Bland, on his side, didn't often find
an interested listener. Something like an intimacy thus sprang up, but
an intimacy of the kind common among men who have little or no point of
contact out of office hours or away from the neutral ground of the club.
Within these limits the meetings had already been numerous before it
occurred to Chip--more or less idly--that while Bland knew too much of
his sad background, he knew nothing of Bland's. An occasional reference
revealed the lawyer as a married man, but beyond that basic fact their
acqu