One evening I availed myself of his invitation--Jenny did not always bid me to dinner, and sometimes I was lonely even as he was--and walked down to Hatcham Ford. Passing Ivydene, I was interested to observe lights in the window, though it was nine o'clock at night. Presumably friend Nelson Powers did not merely use the place as his office (Cartmell's protest had, of course, not produced the smallest effect on Jenny--my own having failed, I should have been annoyed if it had), but was established there with his family. Certainly Jenny did not always procrastinate--she seemed to delay least when the transaction was most doubtful! But I had come to accept Powers's position as one of her freaks and, save for a rather sour amusement, thought at the moment little more about him. That night--it seems strange to say it, but it expresses my inmost feelings--I made friends with Leonard Octon; before I had been merely interested, amused, and exasperated in turn. He chose to remove from me the ban which he laid on and maintained over most of his fellow-creatures--from no merit of my own, as I believe, but because I stood near to Jenny; or, if I can claim any part in the matter, because of a certain openness of mind which, as he was good enough to declare, existed in me. This was to say no more than that, to a certain and limited extent, I agreed with some of his prejudices--his own openness of mind consisting mainly in a hatred of the views and opinions of most other people. I was a very pale copy of him. Things toward which my meditations and my temper bred in me a degree of indifference he frankly and cordially hated. Respectability may be chosen as the word to sum them up; if I questioned its merits, he hated and damned it utterly. This was one of the things which interested and amused--and, when it issued in rudeness to Lady Aspenick, also exasperated. It was not for this that I made friends with him. "When I saw that woman owning that road--coming along in her twopenny glory, with her flunkeys to whistle me out of the way--she looked at me herself, too, mind you, and without a gleam of recognition--I got angry. Not even the public road, mind you! She was a guest as I was." "But you weren't driving a tandem with a restive leader." "And oughtn't she to apologize for driving restive horses? Must I dodge for my life--or for hers--without even a civil word or look--just an order from a flunkey?" "For some reason or another," I observed, "people who are angry always call grooms and footmen flunkeys." He burst into a guffaw of laughter. "Lord, yes, asses all of us, to be sure! And what, after all, does a flick in the face come to, Mr. Philosopher? Nothing at all! It hardly even hurts. But a man calls it a deadly insult--when he's angry; between man and man there must be blood for it when they're angry." "There's the police court," I suggested mildly.