At all events, I never quite liked Felix Kennaston—not even after I came to understand that the man I knew in the flesh was but a very ill-drawn likeness of Felix Kennaston. After all, that is the whole sardonic point of his story—and, indeed, of every human story—that the person you or I find in the mirror is condemned eternally to misrepresent us in the eyes of our fellows. But even with comprehension, I never cordially liked the man; and so, it may well be that his story is set down not all in sympathy. With which Gargantuan parenthesis, in equitable warning, I return again to his story. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ III Of Idle Speculations in a Library FELIX KENNASTON did not write very long that night. He fell idly to the droll familiar wondering how this dull fellow seated here in this luxurious room could actually be Felix Kennaston.... He was glad this spacious and subduedly-glowing place, and all the comfortable appointments of Alcluid, belonged to him. He had seen enough of the scrambling hand-to-mouth makeshifts of poverty, in poverty’s heart-depressing habitations, during the thirty-eight years he weathered before the simultaneous deaths, through a motor accident, of a semi-mythical personage known since childhood as “your Uncle Henry in Lichfield,” and of Uncle Henry’s only son as well, had raised Felix Kennaston beyond monetary frets. As yet Kennaston did not very profoundly believe in this unlooked-for turn; and in the library of his fine house in particular he had still a sense of treading alien territory under sufferance. Yet it was a territory which tempted exploration with alluring vistas. Kennaston had always been, when there was time for it, “very fond of reading,” as his wife was used to state in tones of blended patronage and apology. Kathleen Kennaston, in the old days of poverty, had declaimed too many pilfered dicta concerning literary matters to retain any liking for them.