During this period we see him a serious youth, absorbed in his profession, striving towards success, not for the sake of its rewards in luxurious living, but for the stamp that it gives to efficiency. The famous mountebank of Notre Dame did not juggle with greater fervour. Here and there a woman crosses his path, lingers a little and goes her way. Not that he is insensible to female charms, for he upbraids himself for over-susceptibility. But it seems that from the atavistic source whence he inherited his beautiful hands, there survived in him an instinct which craved in woman the indefinable quality that he could never meet, the quality which was common to Melisande and Phèdre and Rosalind and Fédora and the child-wife of David Copperfield. It is, as I have indicated, the ladies who bid him _bonsoir_. Sometimes he mourns for a day or two, more often he laughs, welcoming regained freedom. None touches his heart. Of men, he has acquaintances in plenty, with whom he lives on terms of good comradeship; but he has scarcely an intimate. At last he makes a friend--an Englishman, Horatio Bakkus; and this friendship marks a turning-point in his history. They met at a café-concert in Montmartre, which, like many of its kind, had an ephemeral existence--the nearest, incidentally, to the real Paris to which Andrew Lackaday had attained. It tried to appeal to a catholicity of tastes; to outdo its rivals inscabrousness--did not Farandol and Lizette Blandy make their names there?--and at the same time to offer to the purer-minded an innocent entertainment. To the latter both Lackaday, with his imitations, and Horatio Bakkus, with his sentimental ballads, contributed. Somehow the mixture failed to please. The one part scared the virtuous, at the other the deboshed yawned. _La Boîte Blanche_ perished of inanition. But during its continuance, Lackaday and Bakkus had a month's profitable engagement. They bumped into each other, on their first night, at the stage-door. Each politely gave way to the other. They walked on together and turned down the Rue Pigalle and, striking off, reached the Grands Boulevards. The Brasserie Tourtel enticed them. They entered and sat down to a modest supper, sandwiches and brown beer. "I wish," said Andrew, "you would do me the pleasure to speak English with me." "Why?" cried the other. "Is my French so villainous?" "By no means," said Andrew, "but I am an Englishman." "Then how the devil do you manage to talk both languages like a Frenchman?" "Why? Is my English then so villainous?" He mimicked him perfectly. Horatio Bakkus laughed. "Young man," said he, "I wish I had your gift." "And I yours."