Thoughtfully I walked up Fifth Avenue to lunch with Charles Glidden. It was one of those dull days when the skies seem to weep soot. Wishing, as I had inferred, to talk uninterruptedly, he had selected the one restaurant of all others that might be called our luncheon clubhouse. The game would be to do our confidential talking in an immense hurry and so forestall inquisitive friends who could be counted on to join us at any moment. Glidden was a delightful man with whom one could be silent without impoliteness and with whom, consequently, one always wished to talk. But one talked at him, and knew that his few mild comments on what was being imparted had little to do with what he might have said if he gossipped. In the fusillade of quotations from one’s friends that riddled us when something had happened, he could not be quoted: one might suspect him of the deep policy of being canny. His taciturnity sprang from no lack of interest in the foolishness of mankind; for if nothing was happening he made it happen. In his habit of being intimate for a while with one after another, and during this period diverting their tastes, he had been largely instrumental in forming the little circles which whirled, and dissolved, and spun into new orbits. And always he appeared to be intent on drawing out what his friends could offer on the altar of his esoteric amusement. In his definite withdrawal of himself from all upsetting contacts with unarranged life, Glidden docketed gatherings arranged according to his wish as exhibits in the closed museum of his mind. One sometimes had the creepy feeling that he listened to one’s thoughts. One never knew what he on his own part thought; whether he approved or whether he disapproved of anything remained a mystery. He had never been heard to criticise. And yet, all of criticism and deferred sentences were in his quiet eyes. When he watched in this fashion, his eyes did not reflect light, nor did they appear to move unless following the antics of the victim under observation. There was no way of predicting on whom his disconcerting scrutiny would fall next; his friends tried to read on his face what he had decided about them and failed alarmingly to get a clue.