And yet one might have been wrong in imagining the malcontents of the solitary drunkard’s mind. God only knows, of course, with what nightmare fancies the man plagued himself. Boys have them, and grow out of them; men, at least, do not admit even to themselves that they have not grown out of them, men do not admit even to themselves that while they indulge in continence they may suddenly find themselves stumbling in the burning darkness among the vile rubbish-heaps of desire. That women walked in all the delicious beauty of the unattainable through Gerald’s tortured mind, I know now. But I did not know it then, for never was a man so secret with another man as Gerald, never was a man so little given to discussing with another those inevitable matters of desire and concupiscence which only by being discussed can be seen in a proper and proportionate light. They should be aired, those secret silly things, that they may be seen for what they are. In the old days there was a god in a garden, and people would do their best to make pretty fancies out of their lusts, naming them to gods, satyrs, fawns, nymphs, sirens, sylphs; they, at least, got rid of them somehow. But now that we see them plainly for what they are, the nasty little enemies of our assault on nobility, a conspiracy founded by Saint Paul has smashed the god in the garden and hidden the pieces under the bed. Gerald, who never spoke but he swore, was the cleanest-mouthed man I ever met with; while from his book one had gathered that there was one main idea in Gerald’s mind; this was purity. It was to do with that one brilliant-childish romance of his that, about seven years before the coming of the green hat, I had first met Gerald. Then, for more than five years, I had not seen nor heard of him, had forgotten him, when one day a lean, dangerous hawk of a young man coming out of the Hammam Baths in Jermyn Street suddenly stopped me. I knew later that he must have been in an agony of shyness, but at the time he merely looked intensely furious. I, not recognising him, thought he was going to hit me, and gaped at him. Bitterly and darkly he told me that some one had told him there was a flat to be let above me in Shepherd’s Market. “I’m staying here at the moment,” he muttered, looking indignantly at the Hammam Baths. Several minutes passed before I could place him, for he had been in uniform that first time, in that transfiguring long-waisted grey coat of the Brigade of Guards.