“Thanks, but I can’t dine with you until I’ve got my evening clothes out of pawn.” Northcote’s schoolfellow laughed heartily. “No, you’ve not altered,” he said. “Just the same amusing cynical old cuss you were at school--just the same cynical old cuss of whom we were so much afraid and who was so frightfully unpopular.” “Poverty and pride were never a popular combination,” said Northcote, aroused from his preoccupation by the sympathy of one of the few who had supported him in his youth. “If I hadn’t been a bit of a football-player I don’t know what would have happened to me in those days. I used to derive pleasure, I remember, from insulting everybody.” “Foxey used to call you Diogenes.” “He used to say that Diogenes was considerably the pleasanter fellow of the two.” “Poor old Foxey always feared you, I believe, just as did everybody else. You were a gloomy, dreamy sort of chap when you were not merely formidable. I remember once you were nearly superannuated. And do you remember Foxey saying there was nothing you might not do, if only you would apply your mind to it; but as it was, he was sure you would never do anything?” “I lived in a mental fog in those days,” said Northcote, with a dreary laugh. “There was a thick vapor wrapped all round my brain. I could see and understand nothing. One fact only was borne in upon me with any sort of clearness. It was that I was vastly superior to everybody else. There never was such a colossal self-esteem.” “Well, you certainly despised everybody in those days. And you must have gone on despising everybody to be capable of doing what you have.” “I remember I was generally chosen to lead the scrum because I had a big voice,” said Northcote, with the light of reminiscence softening his grim mouth. “But your voice is so much greater now than it was then, although it was always an immense booming sort of thing that seemed to come out of your boots. But your hands used to impress me more than anything else. I used to think that if I had hands like that I should break ribs for my private amusement. Do you remember standing the three-quarters on their heads? You were a hefty brute in those days.” “I was always more or less a man of my hands, yet at the same time was always intensely interested in myself. I used to consider that ‘Cad’ Northcote--that was my name at school, although you are too polite to remind me of it--was quite the most wonderful person who had ever been born into this world or into any other. I used to lie awake all night taking myself to pieces as though I had been a watch. Sometimes I dreamed that I was Napoleon, and that it had come to pass that he had been chosen to lead the English pack while he was still at school.” “Well, that dream came true at any rate,” said his schoolfellow, with an outburst of enthusiasm. “You were still with us when you pushed those Welshmen all over the place.” The conversation was curtailed at this point by the appearance of the judge’s marshal.