“Oh, if you look at it that way—” “That’s the way it strikes me.” “But, good Heavens! man, think of what—of what I am!” His gaze was fixed on the stretch of road ahead of him. “What’s that got to do with it? It wouldn’t make any difference to me if you were a murderer or a thief.” “How do you know I’m not?” I couldn’t help asking. “I don’t know that you’re not; but I say it wouldn’t make any difference to me if you were.” The word I am tempted to use of myself at this unexpected offer of good-will is flabbergasted. I am not emotional; still less am I sentimental; both in sentiment and emotion my tendency is to go slow. After a brief silence I said: “Look here! Do you go round making friends among the riffraff of mankind?” “I don’t go round making friends among people of any sort. I’m not the friendly type. I know lots of people, of course; but—but I don’t get beyond just knowing them.” “Is that because you don’t want to?” “Not altogether. I’m a—I’m a lonesome sort of bloke. I never was a good mixer; and when you’re not that, other fellows instinctively close up their ranks against you and shut you out. Not that that matters to me. I hardly ever see a lot with whom I should want to get in. You’re—you’re an exception.” “And for Heaven’s sake, why?” “Oh, for two or three reasons—which I’m not going to tell you. One of these days you may find out.” We left the subject there and sped along in silence. This, then, was the man Regina Barry had turned down; and, notwithstanding his kindness to myself, I could understand her doing it. For a high-spirited girl such as she evidently was he would have been too melancholy. “Very nice” was what she had called him, and very nice he was; but he lacked the something thoroughly masculine that means more to women than to men. Men are used to the eternal-feminine streak in themselves and one another; but women put up with it only when it is like a flaw in an emerald, noticeable to the expert, but to no one else. I asked him how he came to be what Coningsby called physician in ordinary to the club. “By accident. Rufus Legrand asked me to go over and see what I could do for a bad case of D. T.” “He’s the rector of the church opposite, isn’t he?” “Yes, and an awfully good sort. Only parson I know who thinks more of God than he does of a church. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of these days he got the true spirit of religion.” “What’s that?” “What they’re doing at the Down and Out.” “Oh, but they skip religion there altogether.” “They don’t skip religion; they only skip the word—and for a reason.” “What reason?”