“I seek my satisfactions just as you seek your satisfactions, and if you want to get me to work you’ve jolly well got to make me. I don’t choose to work. I choose to keep on my own and a bit loose and take my chance where I find it. You got to take your chances in this world. Sometimes they come bad and sometimes they come good. And very often you can’t tell which it is when they ’ave come....” Then he fell questioning Bealby again and then he talked of the immediate future. He was beating for the seaside. “Always something doing,” he said. “You got to keep your eye on for cops; those seaside benches, they’re ’ot on tramps—give you a month for begging soon as look at you—but there’s flats dropping sixpences thick as flies on a sore ’orse. You want a there for all sorts of jobs. You’re just the chap for it, matey. Saw it soon’s ever I set eyes on you....” He made projects.... Finally he became more personal and very flattering. “Now you and me,” he said, suddenly shifting himself quite close to Bealby, “we’re going to be downright pals. I’ve took a liking to you. Me and you are going to pal together. See?” He breathed into Bealby’s face, and laid a hand on his knee and squeezed it, and Bealby, on the whole, felt honoured by his protection.... § 4 In the unsympathetic light of a bright and pushful morning the tramp was shorn of much of his overnight glamour. It became manifest that he was not merely offensively unshaven, but extravagantly dirty. It was not ordinary rural dirt. During the last few days he must have had dealings of an intimate nature with coal. He was taciturn and irritable, he declared that this sleeping out would be the death of him and the breakfast was only too manifestly wanting in the comforts of a refined home. He seemed a little less embittered after breakfast, he became even faintly genial, but he remained unpleasing. A distaste for the tramp arose in Bealby’s mind and as he walked on behind his guide and friend, he revolved schemes of unobtrusive detachment. Far be it from me to accuse Bealby of ingratitude. But it is true that that same disinclination which made him a disloyal assistant to Mr. Mergleson was now affecting his comradeship with the tramp. And he was deceitful. He allowed the tramp to build projects in the confidence of his continued adhesion, he did not warn him of the defection he meditated. But on the other hand Bealby had acquired from his mother an effective horror of stealing. And one must admit, since the tramp admitted it, that the man stole.