e man was saying. There is heaps of time to work, Mods are nearly a
year and a half off. What do you think of Ward, after the thing that
happened last night?"

I had to plunge right at it, for Foster had not said a word after I had
told him Ward wanted to give me back my money.

"Don't let us talk about Ward," Foster answered, "you know I don't like
him."

"I knew you didn't like him," I corrected, for I thought that what I
had said ought to make a difference.

"You seem to be egging me on to swear at you, so that you may laugh."

"Oh, skittles," I exclaimed.

"You know perfectly well that you can't afford to gamble."

"That has nothing to do with it, because I am not going to gamble, Jack
Ward himself asked me not to play roulette."

"But Ward belongs to a gambling set----"

"I suppose he can please himself about that," I retorted, and it was
not altogether wise of me.

"And you will always be hearing racing 'shop,' and how much somebody
won, nobody ever talks about their losses until they are stone-broke."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"Your father told me," was the answer, and instead of having got him
into a hole I was badly scored off.

"Everybody has something nasty in him somewhere, Balzac said so, and he
was the sort of chap who knew; if we were all perfect this wouldn't be
earth," I said.

"By Jove, you have been thinking a lot," Foster replied, and he stood
still in the road and laughed until I was very annoyed, for I have
heard other people make remarks of that kind without any one else
smiling.

"It is no use talking seriously to you," I said.

"Platitudes are not your line," he answered, and we were as far off
settling about Ward as ever. I returned, however, to the main question
with energy, for it seemed to me to be most important that these two
men should not hate each other, if they were to be my friends. The
gods did not endow me with tact, but they gave me so much courage that
in a short time I can make any situation either very much better or
very much worse. My mother once took in a paper which contained a Tact
Problem every week, and she asked my sister and me to write down
solutions and see if they were right; mine were wrong five times
consecutively, so I gave up that competition, though in a negative sort
of way I should have been of assistance to any competitor. I remember
one of these wonderful problems was, 'At an evening party A tells B
that C looks like a criminal