I repeat, at a first glance he was very like the rest of the young fellows of his day; but I admit there was something about him that grew on you. After watching him for a while I decided that this ascendancy was principally in his eyes. I do not wish to overwork the popular clichés of fire and flash and smolder; Smith's eyes certainly had something of this quality; but it was combined with an expression that, until I can define it better, I will risk calling discontent. I don't mean by this the discontent that is common enough among those other flashers and smolderers, the artists and poets and suchlike. That is usually little more than peevishness and incapacity, and, as one of the breed myself, I rather liked Smith's attitude towards us. With perfect sincerity he looked on us as immensely clever fellows, particularly the late Mr. Jack London and the author of _The Crimson Specter of Hangman Hollow_; but there he had finished with us. We were high and he could not attain to us. Our affairs were so little his affairs that I regret to have to say that, Malvern notwithstanding, I have heard him make use of the expression "between you and I." That is an awful thing for a nice girl to marry. But the War has taught me, among other things, the overwhelming importance of other men's jobs and the comparative insignificance of my own. If young Smith did not express himself in the terms to which I was accustomed, he expressed himself none the less. Don't ask me how, except in a general way. Here again what he calls a "dreadfully gulf" is fixed, across which I can only gaze at the New Wonder. For Chummy, for all his Crimson Specters and his "between you and I," his cocktails at Hatchetts' and his stuffed-bird tympani in the Helmsea Mess, was part of that Wonder that to-day a George takes from an Elizabeth's hands. Four hundred years ago I suppose he would have sold a farm and gone to sea; this, briefly, is what he did in our own day:--