“Is that because you don’t want to?”
“Not altogether. I’m a—I’m a lonesome sort of bloke. I never was a good mixer; and when you’re not that, other fellows instinctively close up their ranks against you and shut you out. Not that that matters to me. I hardly ever see a lot with whom I should want to get in. You’re—you’re an exception.”
“And for Heaven’s sake, why?”
“Oh, for two or three reasons—which I’m not going to tell you. One of these days you may find out.”
We left the subject there and sped along in silence.
This, then, was the man Regina Barry had turned down; and, notwithstanding his kindness to myself, I could understand her doing it. For a high-spirited girl such as she evidently was he would have been too melancholy. “Very nice” was what she had called him, and very nice he was; but he lacked the something thoroughly masculine that means more to women than to men. Men are used to the eternal-feminine streak in themselves and one another; but women put up with it only when it is like a flaw in an emerald, noticeable to the expert, but to no one else.
I asked him how he came to be what Coningsby called physician in ordinary to the club.
“By accident. Rufus Legrand asked me to go over and see what I could do for a bad case of D. T.”
“He’s the rector of the church opposite, isn’t he?”
“Yes, and an awfully good sort. Only parson I know who thinks more of God than he does of a church. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of these days he got the true spirit of religion.”