I came upon him in our lane. I have forgotten to say that Gerald, after a particularly hard spell of dipsomania, would go riding on a hack from the Mews nearby. He had a pair of fine polo breeches with which to do that, and with the fine polo breeches (Moss Bros.) went Barty March’s riding-whip and the jacket of the old grey suit and that hat. A highwayman on an off day, that is what he looked like in the mean lane, passing the time of day with the little bent old man with the blood-shot eyes. “You’ve been drinking,” said Gerald severely to me. “Billy Goat’s won the two-thirty,” wheezed the little bent old man. His hat was the captain of Gerald’s hat. One didn’t, perhaps, look one’s best in the middle of a removal. But Gerald, confound the man, looked positively healthy, taut, tempered, weathered. _Ach, le sale type anglais!_ I told him that his sister had called. “On an Impulse,” I said. Gerald stared at me, his cigarette half-way to his mouth. “Oh!” he said. “Oh!...” “Here’s her telephone number,” I said. He didn’t take the slip of paper I held out. “’Ere,” said the little bent old man, “I’ll give it ’im when he’s better.” Gerald lowered his cigarette, scowling at me pathetically. No one else would have known it was “pathetically.” “Iris called hell!” he accused me. “How you lie! What?” “Honest to God, Gerald!” He flipped away his cigarette and dug his free hand into his pocket as though it was a weapon. Those deep eyes scowled at me, but I wondered what they saw. “That beast,” he whispered, “oh, that beast....” I left him. And I did not see him again until the twelfth evening later. I wish I had. I ought to have been to see him, for I was in the habit of seeing Gerald, and during those twelve days he might, I think he would, have told me about the silly, shoddy thing that had happened, and I could have helped to make him see it as only a silly, shoddy thing. What made me feel responsible for Gerald was that his livid, unreasonable, childish contempt for all accepted things was not contempt at all, but fear, just plain fear. He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it. Piercing that tortured vanity, I felt that life was a huge hungry beast ready to maul Gerald if he so much as tried to placate it--by using, say, a little pumice-stone on his fingers. And one could never, after having seen through his furious _blague_, be rid of an acute sense of the shamefaced childishness in the man, a childishness beaten down, gone crooked, which could only do him a hurt if it was not watched. And one didn’t, quite definitely didn’t, want Gerald to be hurt more than he already hurt himself by just breathing.