"Go on," said Kipps.
"I'm rather a lonely dog myself. This to-night——. I've not had anyone I've spoken to so freely of my Work for months."
"No?"
"You. And, my dear chap, if I can do anything to guide or help you——"
Coote displayed all his teeth in a kindly tremulous smile and his eyes were shiny. "Shake 'ands," said Kipps, deeply moved, and he and Coote rose and clasped with mutual emotion.
"It's reely too good of you," said Kipps.
"Whatever I can do I will," said Coote.
And so their compact was made. From that moment they were Friends, intimate, confidential, high-thinking, sotto voce friends. All the rest of their talk (and it inclined to be interminable) was an expansion of that. For that night Kipps wallowed in self-abandonment and Coote behaved as one who had received a great trust. That sinister passion for pedagoguery to which the Good Intentioned are so fatally liable, that passion of infinite presumption that permits one weak human being to arrogate the direction of another weak human being's affairs, had Coote in its grip. He was to be a sort of lay confessor and director of Kipps, he was to help Kipps in a thousand ways, he was in fact to chaperon Kipps into the higher and better sort of English life. He was to tell him his faults, advise him about the right thing to do——
"It's all these things I don't know," said Kipps. "I don't know, for instance, what's the right sort of dress to wear—I don't even know if I'm dressed right now——"