He was like a bird in appearance. But in mind, Gumbril found, after having seen him once or twice, he was like a caterpillar: he ate all that was put before him, he consumed a hundred times his own mental weight every day. Other people’s ideas, other people’s knowledge—they were his food. He devoured them and they were at once his own. All that belonged to other people he annexed without a scruple or a second thought, quite naturally, as though it were already his own. And he absorbed it so rapidly and completely, he laid public claim to it so promptly that he sometimes deceived people into believing that he had really anticipated them in their ideas, that he had known for years and years the things they had just been telling him, and which he would at once airily repeat to them with the perfect assurance of one who knows—knows by instinct, as it were, by inheritance. At their first luncheon he had asked Gumbril to tell him all about modern painting. Gumbril had given him a brief lecture; before the savoury had appeared on the table, Mr. Boldero was talking with perfect familiarity of Picasso and Derain. He almost made it understood that he had a fine collection of their works in his drawing-room at home. Being a trifle deaf, however, he was not very good at names, and Gumbril’s all-too-tactful corrections were lost on him. He could not be induced to abandon his Bacosso in favour of any other version of the Spaniard’s name. Bacosso—why, he had known all about Bacosso since he was a schoolboy! Bacosso was an old master, already. Mr. Boldero was very severe with the waiters and knew so well how things ought to be done at a good restaurant, that Gumbril felt sure he must recently have lunched with some meticulous gormandizer of the old school. And when the waiter made as though to serve them with brandy in small glasses, Mr. Boldero was so passionately indignant that he sent for the manager. “Do you mean to tell me,” he shouted in a perfect frenzy of righteous anger, “that you don’t yet know how brandy ought to be drunk?” Perhaps it was only last week that he himself, Gumbril reflected, had learned to aerate his cognac in Gargantuan beakers. Meanwhile, of course, the Patent Small-Clothes were not neglected. As soon as he had been told about the things, Mr. Boldero began speaking of them with a perfect and practised familiarity. They were already his, mentally his. And it was only Mr. Boldero’s generosity that prevented him from making the Small-Clothes more effectively his own. “If it weren’t for the friendship and respect which I feel for your father, Mr. Gumbril,” he said, twinkling genially over the brandy, “I’d just annex your Small-Clothes. Bag and baggage. Just annex them.” “Ah, but they’re my patent,” said Gumbril. “Or at least they’re in process of being patented. The agents are at work.”