Trist, however, is not really as monstrous as these maxims would make him out to be. For the full play of his personality he must undoubtedly be calm and prosperous and spoiled; but once he is in that state of bliss he can be extraordinarily kind. One would not see him carrying a poor woman's bundle, or putting himself out over a street casualty; but he has befriended several young artists and musicians, and he lends money capriciously to needy persons at the very moment when money means most to them. He likes to play Fate. I came away from his rooms that first evening a little saddened. I could not help contrasting the past, when he was so necessary to me, with the present, when we each made the other constrained, and had grown so naturally into the power of doing without each other that the early conditions could never be restored. But since then I have fallen into the old Trist habit again, and now I like to be with him almost as much as ever, although I am no longer plastic as I was. I like his fastidiousness, and it amuses me (and perhaps does me good) to watch the skill with which he looks ahead by instinct to ensure his comfort. We are to go down to Miss Gold's to tea one afternoon next week. Trist, it seems, has a taxi-cab driver in his pocket, and he will convey us there. "I telephone him when I want him," said Trist; "it is far better than being bothered with a car of one's own." Of course. CHAPTER XI MR. BEMERTON'S FIRST BED BOOK BRINGS US INTO THE COMPANY OF QUAINT AND LEARNED GENTLEMEN The older I grow, the less, I find, do I want to read about anything but human beings. (The proper study of matured mankind is certainly man.) But human beings as human beings are not enough: they must, to interest me, have qualities of simplicity or candour or quaintness. A few such I have found in Mr. Bemerton's first highly-commended bed book--the _Literary Anecdotes_ of John Nichols, a series of volumes, very unpromising at first, and truly as dull as Mr. Lecky told my friend that a bed book should be, descriptive of the attainments of the principal contributors to _The Gentleman's Magazine_ (best of periodicals) in the second half of the eighteenth century (a period when to be an antiquary and a gentleman was so easy) when that publication belonged to Bowyer the printer. For the most part these old dry-as-dust clergymen and scholars had little enough to recommend them to any one but Bowyer, who seems to have basked with equal satisfaction in the friendship of all; but when one looks deeper one finds treasure.