Horton smiled, smoked, kept his hands in his pockets. "Dear deep old Davey!" "Yes," said Gray consistently, "isn't he a wise old specimen? It's rather horrid for me having thus to mention, as if you had applied to me for a place, that I've picked up a good 'character' of you, but since you insist on it he assured me that I couldn't possibly have a better friend." "Well, he's a most unscrupulous old person and ought really to be ashamed. What it comes to," Haughty added, "is that though I've repeatedly stayed with them they've to the best of his belief never missed one of the spoons. The fact is that even if they had poor Davey wouldn't know it." "He doesn't take care of the spoons?" Gray asked in a tone that made his friend at once swing round and away. He appeared to note an unexpectedness in this, yet, "out" as he was for unexpectedness, it could grow, on the whole, clearly, but to the raising of his spirits. "Well, I shall take care of _my_ loose valuables and, unwarned by the Bradhams and likely to have such things to all appearance in greater number than ever before, what can I do but persist in my notion of asking you to keep with me, at your convenience, some proper count of them?" After which as Horton's movement had carried him quite to the far end of the room, where the force of it even detained him a little. Gray had him again well in view for his return, and was prompted thereby to a larger form of pressure. "How can you pretend to palm off on me that women mustn't in prodigious numbers 'trust' you?" Haughty made of his shoulders the most prodigious hunch. "What importance, under the sun, has the trust of women--in numbers however prodigious? It's never what's best in a man they trust--it's exactly what's worst, what's most irrelevant to anything or to any class but themselves. Their _kind_ of confidence," he further elucidated, "is concerned only with the effect of their own operations or with those to which they are subject; it has no light either for a man's other friends or for his enemies: it proves nothing about him but in that particular and wholly detached relation. So neither hate me nor like me, please, for anything any woman may tell you." Horton's hand had on this renewed and emphasised its proposal of good-night; to which his host acceded with the remark: "What superfluous precautions you take!" "How can you call them superfluous," he asked in answer to this, "when you've been taking them at such a rate yourself?--in the interest, I mean, of trying to persuade me that you can't stand on your feet?" "It hasn't been to show you that I'm silly about life--which is what you've just been talking of. It has only been to show you that I'm silly about affairs," Gray said as they went at last through the big bedimmed hall to the house doors, which stood open to the warm summer night under the protection of the sufficient outward reaches. "Well, what are affairs but life?" Vinty, at the top of the steps, sought to know.