When the girls had driven off, Michael recovered his ordinary appearance by visiting a barber and a hosier. The effect of the shampoo was almost to make him incredulous of the night’s event, and he could not help paying a visit to the Café d’Orange, to verify the alcove in which he had sat. The entrance of the beerhall was closed, however, and he stood for a moment like a person who passes a theater which the night before he has seen glittering. As Michael was going out of the bar, he thought he recognized a figure leaning over the counter. Yes, it was certainly Meats. He went up and tapped him on the shoulder, addressing him by name. Meats turned round with a start. “Don’t you remember me?” asked Michael. “Of course I do,” said Meats nervously. “But for the love of Jerusalem drop calling me by that name. Here, let’s go outside.” In the street Michael asked him why he had given up being Meats. “Oh, a bit of trouble, a bit of trouble,” said Meats. “You are a strange chap,” said Michael. “When I first met you it was Brother Aloysius. Then it was Meats. Now——” “Look here,” said Meats, “give over, will you? I’ve told you once. If you call me that again I shall leave you. Barnes is what I am now. Now don’t forget.” “Come and have a drink, and tell me what you’ve been doing in the four years since we met,” Michael suggested. “B-a-r-n-e-s. Have you got it?” Michael assured him that everything but Barnes as applicable to him had vanished from his mind. “Come on, then,” said Barnes. “We’ll go into the Afrique, upstairs.” Michael fancied he had met Barnes this time in a reincarnation that was causing him a good deal of uneasiness. He had lost the knowingness which had belonged to Meats and the sheer lasciviousness which had seemed the predominant quality of Brother Aloysius. Instead, sitting at the round marble table opposite Michael saw an individual who resembled an actor out of work in the lowest grades of his profession. There was the cheesy complexion, and the over-fashioned suit of another season too much worn and faded now to flaunt itself objectionably, but with its dismoded exaggerations still conveying an air of rococo smartness; perhaps, thought Michael, these signs had always been obvious and it had merely been his own youth which had supposed a type to be an exception. Certainly Barnes could not arouse now anything but a compassionate amusement. How this figure with its grotesque indignity as of a puppet temporarily put out of action testified to his own morbid heightening of common things in the past. How incredible it seemed now that this Barnes had once been able to work upon his soul with influential doctrine. “What have you been doing with yourself?” Michael asked again. “Oh, hopping and popping about. I’ve got the rats at present.” “Where are you living?” Barnes looked at Michael in suspicious astonishment. “What do you want to know for?” he asked.