During the first few days at the club this was my usual state, not of mind, but of sensation. During the next few days I passed into a condition that I can best express as one of physical resignation. The craving for drink was not less insistent, but it was more easily denied. Since I couldn’t get it I could do without it, and not want to dash my head against a stone. But after the words with Andrew Christian I have just recorded I began to feel—oh, ever so slightly!—that Nature had a realm of freedom and vigor in which there was no need of extraordinary stimulants, and of which sunshine, air, and water might be taken as the symbols. With the resting of my overexcited nerves and the response of a body radically healthy to regular sleep and simple food, I began to feel, at least at intervals, that water, air, and sunshine were the natural elements to thrive on. My first glance at Ralph Coningsby showed me a man who had thriven on them. He was the type to whom most of us take at sight—the clean, fresh, Anglo-Saxon type, blue-eyed and fair, whom you couldn’t do anything but trust. “God! how I should like to look like that!” I said to myself the minute I saw him come in. I knew by this time that at the big weekly meetings there were sometimes friendly visitors whose touch with the club was more or less accidental. I had no difficulty in putting this man down as one. He entered as if he were at any ordinary gathering of friends, with a nod here, a handshake there, and a few words with some one else. Then for a minute he stood, letting his eyes search the room till they rested on me, where I stood in a corner of the front sitting-room. There was at once that livening of the glance that showed he had found what he was looking for. Making his way through the groups that were standing about, he came up and offered his hand. “Your name’s Melbury, isn’t it? Mine’s Coningsby. I think you must be the same Melbury who went to the Beaux Arts in the fall of the year in which I left in the spring.” “Oh, you’re that Coningsby? You used to know Bully Harris?” “Rather! He and I lived together for a year in the Rue de Seine.” “And he and I spent a year in the same house in the Rue Bonaparte.” “And now he’s out in Red Wing, Minnesota, doing very well, I hear.” “The last time I saw him was in London. We dined together at the Piccadilly and did a theater.” “And Tommy Runt? Do you ever hear of him?” “Not since he went back to Melbourne; but that chap he was always about with—Saunderson, wasn’t it?—he was killed in a motor accident near Glasgow.” “So I heard. Some one told me—Pickman, I think it was—an Englishman—but you didn’t know Pickman, did you? He left the year I came, which must have been three or four years before your time. By the way, why don’t we sit down?” In the process of sitting down I remembered my manners. “Mr. Coningsby, won’t you let me introduce you to my friend, Mr. Lovey?”