I believe it _was_ the only way. I believe that nobody--no man, at any rate--could have become his friend without those long preliminary periods of silence. He was a locked box, and you had to believe, rather than know, that there was something in it. I believed, and later on I knew; but the revelation was very slow. Within a couple of months, perhaps, I knew the ordinary obvious things about his life that most people would have let me know within a couple of hours. Even then he didn't exactly tell me anything. I deduced, or picked up information by accident, or else asked a deliberate question and received a rather embarrassed or grudging answer. The first time I went up to his room at the College, for example, I saw "Dr. M. Terrington" painted on the outside of the door. Till then I hadn't had the least idea that he was a doctor, and nor had Severn, for at the dinner-party he had introduced him as plain "mister." Anyhow, the information on the door seemed clear enough to me, though it wasn't till a week after that I really learned the truth, and then only by chance. I had cut my hand, and he bandaged it for me very skilfully, which led me to make some complimentary remark about his "doctor's skill." He told me then that he wasn't a medical doctor at all, but a "mere Ph.D." He spoke of it as if it were quite a minor distinction instead of being (as I afterwards found out) almost unique for a man of his age. Gradually, in such ways as this, I got to know the truth about him. It wasn't at all exciting. He had sprung from poor parents (both of them now dead), and had worked his way up to the university by a series of scholarships and exhibitions which, though distinguished enough in themselves, would be tedious to record. He had no relatives who ever troubled about him, and I think I can say that until he came into contact with me and the Severns he had no friends either. He worked hard, knew nobody, went nowhere, and cared for nothing but his microscopes and slides. Twice a week he lectured to a very small class, and the fees from this, along with certain scholarship monies, made his existence just financially possible.