I have occasionally mentioned my friend the Second. A keen, dark-skinned, clean-shaven face, with small blue eyes and regular white teeth. There are no flies on him. His is one of those minds which can grasp every detail of a profession and yet remain very ignorant indeed, a mind which travel has made broader--and shallower. He is a clever, courteous, skilful, well-bred, narrow-minded Broad-Churchman. He is a total abstainer, a non-smoker, and a frequenter of houses of fair reception. If anomaly can go further, I can declare to you that he is engaged to a clergyman's daughter. When he is angered, his face grows as thin as a razor, the small blue eyes diminish to glittering points, and the small white teeth close like a vise. It is then that I am sorry for the clergyman's daughter. We do not understand each other, I fear, because I am so unsentimental. He believes in unpractical things like Money, Success, Empire, Home Life, Football, and Wales for ever. How can a man who puts faith in such visionary matters understand one who builds on the eternal and immovable bedrock of literature and art? He has sober dreams of following in his father's steps and making a fortune for himself, and he considers me weak in the head when I explain that I have made _my_ wealth and am now enjoying it. Would he _ever_ understand, I wonder? "_Yes, there are some from whom our Lady flies, Whose dull, dead souls, rise not at her command, And who, in blindness, press back from their eyes 'The light that never was on sea or land._'" In fact, I should say he is one of those same mechanicians of whom I spoke, in whose lives literature will have no place, and the desire for a private harem supplant the _grande passion_. This may sound absurd when one remembers their love of home; but I speak with knowledge. It is easy enough to make a man out to be a patriot, or a humanitarian, or a home-lover, if you pick and choose from his complicated mentality just what suits that particular label. To know a man as he is, you must be shipmates with him, quarrel with him, mess with him week after week until you are sick of the sight of him. Then, if you are sufficiently sensitive to personality, you will divine his spiritual bedrock beneath all the superimposed recencies, and you will know whether he be "a mere phosphatous prop of flesh" or whether he have in him some genuine metallic rock, from which the fabric of the distant world-state may be fashioned. XXVI Once more I am writing "homeward bound." Homeward bound! Outside the Channel fog is coming down to enfold us, the wind is cold, my stock of fruit, laid in at Las Palmas is done, and George the Fourth is growling through the ventilator, "T' Longships, mister!"