In the early days, when Trenter had known him, Mr. Superbus was a court bailiff, a man who seized the property of unsuccessful litigants, who served writs, attached furniture, and committed all those barbarous acts peculiar to his office. But progression, the inexorable law of getting on, the natural craving for success, brought Mr. Superbus from the atmosphere of a dull county court to a small office in the Insurance Trust Building, and the distinction of having his name painted upon the glass panel of the door. He was officially styled “First Enquiry Clerk.” The “detective” which was printed on the corner of his visiting card was wholly unofficial, and his request to his superiors that a nickel badge should be designed that he might wear on his waistcoat and display at fitting moments when it was necessary to disclose his identity, was refused as being “impracticable and undesirable.” The cinematograph is at once educative and inspirational. Mr. Superbus spent most of his spare evenings in watching the pictures. Those he liked best dealt with the careers of young, beautiful but penurious girls, who were pursued by rich and remorseless villains, and were rescued in the nick of time from a fate which is popularly supposed to be worse than death, by a handsome young hero, with the assistance of a stern-faced officer of the law, who smoked cigars, wore a derby hat, and from time to time turned back his coat to display the badge of his calling. A film which had no detective, and dealt merely with the love of a millionaire’s beautiful young wife for his secretary, was unpalatable to him, even though it featured his favourite artists and showed, in the course of its telling, tremendous railway accidents, landslides, riots and the enervating effects of cocaine. Before the open window of his parlour, Mr. Superbus sat in a state of profound meditation. Though the day was chilly, he was in his shirt-sleeves, for he was one of those hot-blooded men in whom the variations of climate peculiar to his native land produced no effect. It was an open secret that he was one of those hardy souls who swam in the Serpentine every Christmas Day, preferably breaking the ice to get in, and his portrait appeared with monotonous regularity every twenty-sixth of December in all the better-class illustrated newspapers. His good lady came bustling in with a shiver. She restricted her own bathing operations to the decent privacy of a four by seven bathroom. “You’ll catch your death of cold there, Julius,” she said. “Fancy sitting there from morning till night doing nothing!” “I’m not doing nothing,” said Julius quietly. “I’m thinking.” “Well, that’s what I call doing nothing,” said Mrs. Superbus, bustling round and laying the cloth. She had an extraordinary appreciation of her husband’s qualities, admired him secretly, but felt that the smooth harmonies of matrimony might well be disturbed if she committed the error of showing her feelings.