"I thought the whole war was axed out of my life--with everyone I knew in it or through it. I wrote all that stuff about myself because I couldn't help it. It enabled me to find my balance, to keep myself sane. I had to bridge over--connect somehow--the Andrew Lackaday of 1914 with the Andrew Lackaday of 1919. A couple of months ago, I thought of sending it to you. You know my beginnings and my dear old father Ben Flint and so forth. You came bang into the middle of my most intimate life. I knew in what honour and affection you were held among those whom I--to whom I--am infinitely devoted. I..." He paused a moment, and tugged hard at his cigar and regarded me with bent brows and compressed lips of his parade manner. "I am a man of few friendships. I gave you my unreserved friendship--it may not be worth much--but there it is." He glared at me as though he were defying me to mortal combat, and when I tried to get in a timid word he wiped it out of my mouth with a gesture. "I wanted you to know the whole truth about me. Once I never thought about myself. I wasn't worth thinking about. But the war came. And the war ended. And I'm so upside down that I'm bound to think about myself and clear up myself, in the eyes of the only human being that could understand--namely you--or go mad. But I never reckoned to see you again in the flesh. Our lives were apart as the poles. It was in my head to write to you something to that effect, when I should receive an answer to my last letter. I never dreamed that you should meet me now, as I am." "It never occurred to you that I might value your friendship and take a little trouble to seek you out?" "I must confess," said he, "that I did not suspect that anyone, even you, would have thought it worth while." I laughed. He was such a delicious simpleton. So long as he could regard me as someone on the other side of the grave, he could reveal to me the intimacies of his emotional life; but as soon as he realized his confidant in the flesh, embarrassment and confusion overwhelmed him. And, ostrich again, thinking that, once his head was hidden in the sands of Petit Patouism, he would be invisible to mortal eye, he had persuaded himself that his friends would concur in his supposed invisibility.