In appearance the gardener was a fairly mediocre study in black and white. He had a white and wooden face, black hair as smooth as a wet seal’s back, thin arms and legs, and enormous hands and feet. He was not indispensable to any one, but he believed that he was a pillar supporting the world. It sometimes makes one nervous to reflect what very amateur pillars the world seems to employ. He lived in a boarding-house in Penny Street, W. A boarding-house is a place full of talk, it has as many eyes as a peacock, and ears to correspond. It is lamentably little, and yet impossible to ignore. It is not a dignified foundation for a pillar. The gardener was twenty-three. Twenty-three is said to be the prime of life by those who have reached so far and no farther. It shares this distinction with every age, from ten to three-score and ten. On the first of June, in his twenty-fourth year, the gardener broke his boot-lace. The remains of the catastrophe dangled from his hand. String was out of the question; one cannot be decent dressed in string, he thought, with that touch of exaggeration common to victims of disasters. The world was a sordid and sardonic master, there was no heart in the breast of Fate. He was bereft even of his dignity, there is no dignity in the death of a boot-lace. The gardener’s twenty-three years were stripped from him like a cloak. He felt little and naked. He was so busy with his emotions that he had forgotten that the door of his room was open. It was rather like the girl Courtesy to stand on the landing boldly staring in at a man sitting on his bedroom floor crushed by circumstances. She had no idea of what was fitting. Any other woman would have recognised the presence of despair, and would have passed by with head averted. But the girl Courtesy said, “Poor lamb, has it broken its boot-lace?” The gardener continued in silence to watch the strangling of his vanity by the corpse of the boot-lace. His chief characteristic was a whole heart in all that he did. A tear should have appeared in Courtesy’s eye at the sight of him. But it did not. “Give me the boot,” she said, advancing into the room in the most unwomanly manner. And she knotted the boot-lace with a cleverness so unexpected—considering the sort of girl she was—that the difference in its length was negligible, and the knot was hidden beneath the other lace. “Women have their uses,” thought the gardener. But the thought was short-lived, for Courtesy’s next remark was: “There, boy, run along and keep smilin’. Somebody loves you.” And she patted him on the cheek. Now it has been made clear that the gardener was a Man of Twenty-three. He turned his back violently on the woman, put on his boot, and walked downstairs bristling with dignity.