He was called “William,” and I knew him well in a week. He had a rich fund of humour, but was very honest and hard-working and a Londoner to the backbone. He hated foreign waiters and said that the glitter of his shiny hair was produced by a little fat from the grill well rubbed in every morning. No barber’s stuff could touch it, he said, and if it made him smell like a mutton chop, who thought the worse of him for that? He expected twopence after each luncheon, and if any stranger gave him less, he made screamingly funny remarks. In his evenings he waited at the banquets of the City Companies, which are the most stupendous feeds the world has ever known since Nero’s times; and at these dinners he often heard State and other secrets, which he said would have been worth a Jew’s eye to him if he had not been an honest man. He didn’t, of course, say these things as if they were meant to be true. Simple people no doubt would have believed them, but I soon got to notice that he accompanied many of his most remarkable statements with a wink, which disarmed criticism, as the saying is. He was a good man at heart and had a wife at home and also a lame daughter who would never walk; so, though one would not have thought it, he had his trials. In fact nearly everybody I met, when I got to know them, told me about distressing things which they hid from the world. Even Mr. Blades, who seemed to preserve the even tenor of his way with great skill, confessed to me that he had a brother very different from himself and evidently very inferior in every way. In fact it looked to me, though of course I never hinted at such a thing, that the brother of Mr. Blades must have been rapidly sinking into a shady customer of the deadliest sort. Really for the moment, after I took to proper lunches, it seemed as if I was the only man in the office with no private worries. VI I found that the clerks at the Apollo Fire Office were much more interesting than the work, and I told Mr. Blades so on an occasion when with his usual great generosity he had given me some useful help, because I was behind-hand and had forgotten what I ought to have remembered. But that I should find the clerks more interesting than the work did not please Mr. Blades, and he thought badly of the idea. “If you are going to be an insurance clerk, the first thing is to master the insurance business,” he said, very truly and wisely to me; and then it was that I told him of my great ambition to become an actor in the future. He instantly disapproved of it. “There was a clerk in this office in the past, and he went on the stage and did well,” he admitted; “but he was exceptional in every way. He was older than you and had a very remarkably handsome face.” “In tragedy,” I said, “a handsome face doesn’t matter so much.”