"Oh! a fancy of mine. It is my business to study people. And you do not look like the run of folk in Highbourne Gardens. Most of the folk in Highbourne Gardens are dear, good, comfortable folk, but stodgy. They are as alike as peas. I could tell you their exact method of life, even to what they have for breakfast. They are products of manufacture, all turned out just alike to the last hair, and all doing just the same things every day, without the least variation. That is what stodginess means." "And I am not stodgy?" Arthur laughed. "No; you are fluid. You have not hardened into shape yet. You are a problem." Arthur looked at the dark, ironic face, and felt a sudden friendliness for the man. It was a long time since he had conversed with a man of ideas; he had scarcely done so since he had left Oxford. The church young men he had found distasteful to him. They were good young men for the most part, much enamoured of respectability, laboriously virtuous, cherishing many mild scruples about the use of the world and inclined to judge it by standards quite foreign to their real tastes; but they had no mental horizons. They were also inclined to be a little shy of him, as a rich man's son with a superior education; a little envious, too, and not at home in his presence, so that intercourse with them had not been easy. But here was a man who spoke another kind of language; it was that language of ideas which at once asserts kinship, among those to whom it is intelligible. Arthur drew his chair to the table, and soon found himself absorbed in conversation. Hilary Vickars talked slowly, with hesitating pauses--a trick which lent emphasis to what he said. It was as though he fumbled for the right word, and then flashed it out like a sudden torch. Arthur noticed, too, that he occasionally did not pronounce a word in the way common among educated men. The variation was slight; it could scarcely have been called erroneous; but it suggested some deficiency of early training. Perhaps the boy's face betrayed his surprise too ingenuously, for after one of these variations Vickars said abruptly: "I envy you. It was my dream to go to Oxford. I didn't dream true in that case." "Perhaps you have done just as well without Oxford," said Arthur generously. "No, I have never cherished that--delusion. Deprivations in middle life don't matter; but deprivations in early life can never be made up." He paused a moment, and then added. "I was a gardener before I became an author." Arthur looked his surprise, whereat Vickars laughed.