“How has it come to this, old fellow?” I asked, laying my hand upon his shoulder. His coat was unpleasantly greasy, and I drew my hand away again as quickly as I could, and tried to wipe it covertly upon my handkerchief.
“Oh, it’s a long, story,” he answered carelessly, “and too conventional to be worth telling. Some of us go up, you know. Some of us go down. You’re doing pretty well, I hear.”
“I suppose so,” I replied; “I’ve climbed a few feet up a greasy pole, and am trying to stick there. But it is of you I want to talk. Can’t I do anything for you?”
We were passing under a gas-lamp at the moment. He thrust his face forward close to mine, and the light fell full and pitilessly upon it.
“Do I look like a man you could do anything for?” he said.
We walked on in silence side by side, I casting about for words that might seize hold of him.
“You needn’t worry about me,” he continued after a while, “I’m comfortable enough. We take life easily down here where I am. We’ve no disappointments.”
“Why did you give up like a weak coward?” I burst out angrily. “You had talent. You would have won with ordinary perseverance.”
“Maybe,” he replied, in the same even tone of indifference. “I suppose I hadn’t the grit. I think if somebody had believed in me it might have helped me. But nobody did, and at last I lost belief in myself. And when a man loses that, he’s like a balloon with the gas let out.”
I listened to his words in indignation and astonishment. “Nobody believed in you!” I repeated. “Why, I always believed in you, you know that I—”