"And it was a first-class business with armed escorts, caravans, wild tribes--a matter of great danger and subtle politics--railways, finance--the whole hang of the international situation and internal conditions--a big scoop--everything that usually is butter and honey to Jaff Chayne--an ideal job for him in every way. But no. He was fed up with scalliwagging all over the place. He wanted a season in town!" At the idea of Jaffery yearning to play the Society butterfly I could not help laughing. Jaffery lounging down Bond Street in immaculate vesture! Jaffery sipping tea at afternoon At Homes! Jaffery dancing till three o'clock in the morning! It was all very comic, and Arbuthnot seeing the matter in that aspect laughed too. But, on the other hand, it was all very incomprehensible. To Jaffery a job was a sacred affair, the meaning of his existence. He was a Mercury who took himself seriously. The more remote and rough and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission, the more he liked it. He had never spared himself. He had been a model special correspondent ever ready at a moment's notice to set off to the ends of the earth. And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a task after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the greatest political significance, and thereby endangering his peculiar and honourable position on the paper. "If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like that," said Arbuthnot, "we would have chucked him altogether. In fact we didn't tell him that we wouldn't." It was very mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had never been a man of mystery, like Adrian. I went away wondering. If it had occurred to me at the time that I was destined to play Boswell to Jaffery's Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to him and demanded a solution of my difficulties. As it was, in my unawakened condition, I did nothing of the kind. I spent an hour or two looking up something in the British Museum, stopped at the bootmaker's to give an order concerning Susan's riding-boots (_vide_ diary) and drove home to dinner, to a comfortable chat with Barbara, during which I gave her an account of the day's doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the contented and inoffensive man. A fortnight or so passed before I saw Jaffery again. Happening to be in Westminster in the forenoon--I had come up to town on business--I mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell. A dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe in front of the fire. It wasn't even a good coal fire. Some austere former tenant had installed an electric radiator in the once comfort-giving grate. But Jaffery did not seem to mind. The remains of breakfast were on the table which the dingy servitor began to clear. Jaffery rose from the depths of his easy chair like an agile mammoth. "Hullo, hullo, hullo!"