It was so in my own case. Instead of merely nodding when we met, he took to stopping to exchange a few words, telling me on one occasion that I had very much alarmed him.
“How?” I inquired.
“I have been reading a little book of yours, called A Book of Strange Sins,” he answered. “From the moment I first heard of it I was in terror lest my own most secret and dearest sin had been exposed and laid open to the light of day. But in searching its pages anxiously and fearfully, I was relieved, not to say reprieved, to find that my particular vices have escaped your notice.”
Then, finding that though making no claim to be a mountaineer I had done some small amount of climbing in Switzerland and elsewhere, and finding, moreover, that I made no further advances, he took to joining me on my way backward and forward to the station, becoming more and more friendly at each meeting, and finally he got in the habit of looking out for me that he and I might travel up and down together. Then he wrote:
“Come and crack a flask with me on Sunday next any time you like after 8.30 p.m.”
I accepted the invitation, of which he again reminded me when I met him in the street next day.
“Don’t forget,” he said, “that you are supping with me on Sunday any time that suits you after half-past eight.”
At half-past eight on Sunday I was with him.
“I know you are a smoker,” he said, producing a parcel of fat and long Manilla cigars, each carefully cased in silver paper.
They had been in his possession, he told me (I could well believe it), for twenty-five years, and better cigars I have never smoked. Then, as he happened to be in the mood for talking and I am a good listener, he talked incessantly, incisively and brilliantly till nine, ten, eleven had come and gone, when frankly I began to feel hungry, and no sign of supper. Twelve and half-past twelve came, and I fear my attention wandered, for I was trying to recall the condition of the joint which had done duty among my own hungry family some twelve hours before. Should the same joint have reappeared at the table for the usual Sunday night “cold supper,” the chances were that on returning home I should be reduced to piratical raids upon the larder in search of bread and cheese.