Except when I have a regular holiday, my leisure hours are limited, but I was taking a night off. It was not because I had nothing to do, but because I had so many things to think of that my brain had become hopelessly muddled in the process, and a few blank hours seemed to be advisable. When this kind of retreat becomes necessary, I invariably find my way to Holborn, to a very plain-fronted establishment there over which is the name Warburton. If you are a gastronomic connoisseur in any way you may know it, for Warburton's is a restaurant where you can get an old-fashioned dinner cooked as nowhere else in London, I believe, and enjoy an old port afterwards which those delightful sinners, our grandfathers, would have sat over half the night, and been pulled out from under the table in the morning perchance. I am not abnormally partial to the pleasures of the table, but I have found a good dinner in combination with first-rate port, rationally dealt with, an excellent tonic for the brain.
I do not suppose any one knew my name at Warburton's, and I have always prided myself on not carrying my profession in my face. The man who dined opposite to me that night possibly began by taking me for a prosperous city man, to whom success had come somewhat early, or perhaps for a barrister, not of the brilliant kind, but of the steady plodders who get there in the end by sheer force of sticking power. I was not in the least interested in him until he spoke to me—asked me to pass the Worcester sauce, in fact. His voice attracted me, and his hands. It was a voice which sounded out of practise, as if it were seldom used, and his hands were those of an artist. I made some casual remark, complimentary to Warburton's, and we began to talk. He seemed glad to do so, but he spoke with hesitation, not as one who has overcome an impediment in his speech, but as one who had forgotten part of his vocabulary. The reason leaked out presently.
"I wonder whether there is something—how shall I put it?—simpatica between us?" he said suddenly.
"Why the speculation?" I asked.
"Otherwise I cannot think why I am talking so much," he said with a nervous laugh. "I live alone, I hardly know a soul, and all I say in the course of a week could be repeated in two minutes, I suppose."
"Not a healthy existence," I returned.
"It suits me. I dine here most nights; the journey to and fro forms my daily constitutional. You are not a regular customer here?"
"No, an occasional one only. I should guess that you are engaged in artistic work of some kind."
"Right!" he said with a show of excitement. "And when I tell you I live in Gray's Inn do you think you could guess what kind of work it is?"
"That is beyond me," I laughed. "Gray's Inn sounds a curious place for an artist."