One evening, when I was eighteen or nineteen, coming home from the Latin Quarter, where I was a student, to dine with my people, in the Rue Oudinot, I found Mr. Ambrose in the drawing-room. Or, if you will, I found a stranger in the drawing-room, but a stranger whom it took me only a minute or two to recognise. My father, at my entrance, had smiled, with a little air of mystery, and said to me, “Here is an old friend of yours. Can you tell who it is?” And the stranger, also—somewhat faintly—smiling, had risen, and offered me his hand. I looked at him—looked at him—and, in a minute,% I exclaimed, “It’s Mr. Ambrose!” I can see him now almost as clearly as I saw him then, when he stood before me, faintly smiling: tall and thin, stooping a little, dressed in black, with a long broad beard, long hair, and a pale, worn, aquiline face. It is the face especially that comes back to me, pale and worn and finely aquiline, the face, the high white brow, the deep eyes set wide apart, the faint, faded smile: a striking face—an intellectual face—a handsome face, despite many wrinkles—an indescribably sad face, even a tragic face—and yet, for some reason, a face that was not altogether sympathetic. Something, something in it, had the effect rather of chilling you, of leaving you where you were, than of warming and attracting you; something hard to fix, perhaps impossible to name. A certain suggestion of remoteness, of aloofness? A suggestion of abstraction from his surroundings and his company, of inattention, of indifference to them? Of absorption in matters alien to them, outside their sphere? I did not know. But there was surely something in his face not perfectly sympathetic. I had exclaimed, “It’s Mr. Ambrose!” To that he had responded, “Ah, you have a good memory.” And then we shook hands, and he sat down again. His hand was thin and delicate, and slightly cold. His voice was a trifle dry, ungenial. Then he asked me the inevitable half-dozen questions about myself—how old I was, what I was studying, and so forth—but though he asked them with an evident intention of being friendly, one felt that he was all the while half thinking of something else, and that he never really took in one’s answers. And gradually he seemed to become unconscious of my presence, resuming the conversation with my father, which, I suppose, had been interrupted by my arrival. “The world has forgotten me. My followers have dropped away. You yourself—where is your ancient ardour? The cause I have lived for stands still. My propaganda is arrested. I am poor, I am obscure, I am friendless, and I am sixty-five years old. But the great ideals, the great truths, I have taught, remain. They are like gold which I have mined. There the gold lies, between the covers of my books, as in so many caskets. Some day, in its necessities, the world will find it. What is excellent cannot perish. It may lie hid, but it cannot perish.”