Dudley Pollak was a mysterious bird. He was a married man in the late fifties, who had been to Cambridge, made the Grand Tour, lived in Paris, Berlin and Italy, known numbers of fairly eminent people, owned a large country house, appeared to have means, possessed very beautiful furniture and all sorts of _objets d’art_, and was a cultivated man—in most of which respects he differed exceedingly from the inhabitants of Martin’s Point. Now, what do you suppose was the reason why Pollak and Mrs. Pollak let their large house furnished, and spent several years in a small cottage in a rather dreary village street a couple of miles from Martin’s Point? George never knew, and nobody else ever knew. The fantastic and scandalous theories evolved by Martin’s Point to explain this mystery were amusing evidence of the vulgar stupidity of those who formed them, and have no other interest. The Pollaks themselves said that they had grown tired of their large house and that Mrs. Pollak was weary of managing servants. So simple is the truth that this very likely was the real explanation. At any rate, there they lived together in their cottage, crowded with furniture and books, cooking their own meals very often—they were both excellent cooks—and waited on by a couple of servants who “lived out.” Now, although Pollak was forty years older than George, he was in a sense the boy’s first real friend. The Pollaks had no children of their own, which may go to explain this odd but deep friendship. Pollak was a much wilier bird than poor old Slush. He sized Isabel up very quickly and accurately, and just politely refused to let her quarrel with him, and just as politely refused to receive her. But he was so obviously a gentleman, so obviously a man of means, that no reasonable objection could be made when he proposed to George Augustus that “Georgie” should come to tea once a week and learn chess. Martin’s Point was a very chess-y place; it was somehow a mark of respectability there. Before this, George had gone to play chess with a very elderly gentleman, who put so much of the few brains he had into that game that he had none left for the preposterous poems he composed, or, indeed, anything else. So every Wednesday George went to tea with the Pollaks.