Your name happened to come up in conversation, in connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the Dudley.

Staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with.

I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant.

He told me.

He told me right out before everybody.
It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?
There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide.