He is always cold and manifestly a sick man; but he has that wonderful gift of the London idler of never being so ill that it is necessary to stay at home. Home, do I say? It is a word which, we are too often told, the English have and the French, to their eternal loss, have not; but I should not like to see the inside of the waterman's sanctuary. It is perhaps wiser to be careful how we pity the French. I have seen his wife: for she brings him dinner in a bowl--a dispirited, broken woman. But his children? It is too horrible a thought. CHAPTER V MR. DABNEY OF _THE BALANCE_ LETS HIMSELF GO I had not long been over Bemerton's when Mrs. Duckie knocked at the door to ask if Mr. Dabney, the gentleman upstairs, the gentleman on the press, might have a few words with me. Of course I said yes, and in a minute or so he came in--a man of the ordinary age in London just now, clean shaved, with prematurely grey hair, a slightly discontented expression, and a sensitive, critical mouth. He made the usual apologies that a well-bred man makes to a stranger with whom he intends to be friendly, and attributed his visit to a remark of Mrs. Duckie's to the effect that I had been living in Buenos Ayres since 1875 and had only just returned. "It seemed to me," he added, "that to an observant man London and the English generally must after so long an exile present many changes, and I thought you would perhaps allow me to ask you a few questions about your impressions for an article in my paper." I said that provided my name was not mentioned I had no objection whatever, although I doubted, &c. &c.; but I might, as it happened, have spared myself that excursion into conventional false modesty, for I soon found that Mr. Dabney had no real intention of interviewing me at all, but only wanted the stimulus of my experience, or the excuse of my mere existence, to interview himself. As he talked on I wondered if that is the way that all interviews by the more capable and thoughtful journalists are done. May be. His paper, it seems, is _The Balance_, a weekly critical review which he runs almost single-handed ("Everything that means anything," he says, "is done by one man"), the financial backing coming from a source which he said he was not in a position to reveal, to me or indeed to any one. _The Balance_ has a circulation of less than two thousand; but, as Mr. Dabney says, every one who counts has to read it. Its aim is to be sane, impartial, and fearless (the aim of all of us), and Mr. Dabney really believes that it achieves this end; but his mind, I should say, with all its vigour and acumen, though naturally inclined to justice and courage, is about as capable of impartiality as a prize-fighter is capable of metaphysics.