The tremendous cleverness, the literary society, the political ambition, the Bournemouth sisters all seemed to flop with his every movement a little nearer to the floor.

I hadn't had an Oxford training and I had never encountered the great man at whose feet poor Dawling had most submissively sat and who had addressed him his most destructive sniffs; but I remember asking myself how effectively this privilege had supposed itself to prepare him for the career on which my friend appeared now to have embarked.

I remember too making up my mind about the cleverness, which had its uses and I suppose in impenetrable shades even its critics, but from which the friction of mere personal intercourse was not the sort of process to extract a revealing spark.

He accepted without a question both his fever and his chill, and the only thing he touched with judgment was this convenience of my friendship.

He doubtless told me his simple story, but the matter comes back in a kind of sense of my being rather the mouthpiece, of my having had to put it together for him.