After a time I began to sit at his table. He accepted me without emotion. Life to him, evidently, was full of such facts as my presence there, facts to which one must adapt one's self with the least possible fuss. He seemed, in fact, in perpetual process of readjustment. He'd sit there quietly, sipping his green poison, till diabolically I'd mention some name of literary fame. It was like pressing a button--the effect was so instantaneously sure. First would come a few detached sentences, like a modulation. Then insensibly he had slid into the main theme, and it was--what shall I call it?--exquisite, there's no other word for it. There was such depth to the thing, such subtlety of dissection, such a wealth of sudden, baring illuminations--and all that cloaked, softened in a haze of gentle scepticism that left nothing of dogmatic asperities. I compared it with the snorting, imperial utterances of my German Professor at college. It was French, that's what it was, in its breadth, its charity, its continual attenuation and inter-correction, its horror of the dictatorial, the pedantic. But don't think that he animated himself in this. No, he kept his immovable--I came near saying "silent," and really, even while he spoke, he gave an impression of silence--his immovable, detached calm. All this, it came as from another man. It _was_ another man, the past man. He was not creating now; he was merely re-reading the creations of the past man, objectively, too, with a certain mild astonishment at the performance. "You must have studied deeply," I said, one night, as I sat, still dazzled, long after he had spoken his last word. He looked at me hazily. "I have my Harvard Ph.D.," he said, absent-mindedly. "I lectured afterward." "Then, for God's sake," I blurted out, tortured by the vision of that life calmly ruining itself; "for God's sake, what are you doing here?" His eyes turned absolutely inside out. From their interior contemplation they flashed outward. He was looking at me; for the first time I had that feeling completely--that he was looking at me, a hard, profound, startled stare. Then, before I could make a movement, a gesture of protest, he had risen to his feet. "Good-night," he said, brusquely, and he had shuffled out of the room. For three days he did not appear. I had hurt him, insulted him. I waited for him, with a desire for reparation. Yet when he finally came I saw that I was mistaken. There was no resentment, absolutely none, in his manner as he shuffled up to the table and sat down. But before even the usual green poison had been set before him he had drawn from his breast pocket a square piece of cardboard and had thrown it to me.