"Oh, I'm so sorry you've got to go!" she said effusively. "And I'm awfully sorry about that too, you know! You will come round again? Shan't he, Adolf, you'd love to see Mr. Massel again! Not at all, not at all; oh, good night!" On the other side of the door he remembered his translation of Dante. "Blast Dante!" he exclaimed through his teeth. It was the fit of profound misogyny which followed this entirely unsatisfactory incident that fitted him so completely for the effusiveness and glitter of Wilfrid Strauss, and for that interlude with Kate which, only too conventional in its mere detail, was nevertheless at once the end and the beginning of Philip Massel's boyhood. CHAPTER XVI A certain hesitancy checks me upon the appearance of Wilfrid Strauss in this narration; even though I am aware how easy and profitable it is to philosophize upon the _deus ex machina_; how it is entertaining to demonstrate that from the flimsiest accidentals the most stalwart essentials depend. Yet the Wilfrid Strauss phase in Philip's development is not so much to be considered a stalwart essential as an exact statement of accounts, a period, a signpost whose backward arm pointed to obscure chaos, whose forward arm pointed at least to clearer issues, more breadth, more light. It is probable that one Strauss and another had from time to time come into some sort of contact with Philip, for in such communities as Whitechapel, Brownlow Hill and Doomington, from the turbid mass of Jewish tailordom a type perpetually emerges which is volatile, swift, scornful of the mere labour of hands, ostentatious of the agile intellectual qualities which make the type invaluable for undertakings rarely entirely scrupulous. If previously, then, Philip had encountered a Strauss in embryo or in maturity, there was no point at which their respective strengths and weaknesses had met. Yet, in point of fact, it is Eulalie et Cie., Paris, of undefined occupations, who have kept this particular and actual Mr. Wilfrid Strauss too busily engaged, on the Rue de Rivoli and in Leicester Square, for his appearance before this date in the lesser thoroughfares of Doomington. And it is not possible to declare that Strauss, as he swaggered gently down Transfer Street from the Inland Station, would have met Philip Massel on any other afternoon than the May afternoon in the year of Philip's history I have now attained.