As time went on, acquaintance after acquaintance would drop in to see me, and would hint gravely at a deep and romantic passion which the Bantam had imparted to them alone. When I informed them that I also was in his confidence, they would repeat to me the same vague story of persecuted loveliness, but always with embellishments. By and by, the embellishments varied so irreconcilably that I began to suspect that they referred to more than one girl. Most of us were in love with love in those days; we were all quite certain that an incandescent purifying passion lay ahead of us. It might knock at our door any hour--and then our particular problem would be solved. This hope was rarely mentioned. To one another we strove to give the impression of being cynical and careless. Yet always, beneath our pose of flippancy, we were seeking the face pre-destined to be for us the most beautiful in all the world. For myself, I was feverishly eager in its quest. I would scour the green-gray uplands of the Thames, telling myself that she might lie hidden in the cheerful quiet of some thatched farm. Every new landscape became the possible setting for my individual romance. I lived each day in expectancy of her coming. Sometimes at nightfall I would pause outside a lighted shop-window, arrested by a girl’s profile, and would pretend to myself that I had found her. That was how Rossetti found Miss Siddall; perhaps that was how it would happen to myself. One thing was certain: whenever and wherever I found her, whether in the guise of shop-girl, dairy-maid, or lady, for me the golden age would commence. I stalked through life on the airy stilts of an æsthetic optimism. Ah, but the Bantam, he was all for doing! If he could not find the love he wanted, he would seize the next best. Yet he would never admit that he was in love. He deceived himself into believing that he acted on the most altruistic motives. If others misunderstood him, it was because they were of grosser fiber. Other men, doing the things he did, laughingly acknowledged their rakishness; he, however, considered himself a self-appointed knight-errant to ladies in distress. He became involved in endless entanglements. It was by appealing to his higher nature with some pitiful story, that his transient attractions caught him.