It was the impersonal abode of the male bird of passage.
"Sit down," said he, "and have a drink." I declined, alleging the fact that a philosophically minded country gentleman of domestic habits does not require alcohol at half past eleven in the morning, except under the stress of peculiar circumstances.
"I'm going to have one anyway!" He disappeared and presently reentered with a battered two-handled silver quart pot bearing defaced arms and inscription, a rowing trophy of Cambridge days, which he always carried about with him on no matter what lightly equipped expedition--it is always a matter of regret to me that Jaffery, as I have mentioned before, missed his seat in the Cambridge boat; but when one despoils a Proctor of his square cap and it is found the central feature of one's rooms beneath a glass shade such as used to protect wax flowers from the dust, what can one expect from the priggish judgment of university authority ?--he reentered, with this vessel full of beer.

He nodded, drank a huge draught and wiped his moustache with his hand.
"Better have some.

I've got a cask in the bedroom." "Good God!" said I, aghast.

"What else do you keep there?
A side of bacon and a Limburger cheese and Bombay duck ?" Now just imagine a civilised gentleman keeping a cask of beer in his bedroom.
Jaffery laughed and took another swig and called me a long, lean, puny-gutted insect; which was not polite, but I was glad to hear the deep "Ho! ho! ho!" that followed his vituperation.
"All the same," said I, reclining on the cleared sofa and lighting a cigarette, "I should like to know why you missed one of the chances of your life in not going out to Persia." He stood, for a moment or two, scrabbling in whisker and beard; and, turning over in his mind, I suppose, that Barbara was my wife, and Susan my child, and I myself an inconsiderable human not evilly disposed towards him, he apparently decided not to annihilate me.
"It was hell, Hilary, old chap, to chuck the Persian proposition," said he, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking out of the window at the infinitely reaching landscape of the chimney pots of south London, their grey smoke making London's unique pearly haze below the crisp blue of the March sky.

"Just hell!" he muttered in his bass whisper, and craning round my neck I could, with the tail of my eye, catch his gaze, which was very wistful and seemed directed not at the opalescent mystery of the London air, but at the clear vividness of the Persian desert.