It might have been by reason of something conveyed in his visitor's tone that the Ambassador said: "With me in particular you mean?" Ralph met it handsomely. "Ah I could wish nothing better for him than you!" "And nothing better for me than him?" Ralph kept his eyes kindly on his country's representative. "Yes, since I find you so remarkably good for myself." The Ambassador acknowledged the tribute, yet couldn't but formulate after all a certain inward confusion. "I'm only puzzled by your not having spoken to me of your friend and yourself a moment ago as separate persons--but on the contrary of your having arrived, wasn't it? at some common identity or wonderful unity. You _are_ the other fellow, you said, didn't you?--and the other fellow, by the same stroke, is you. So that when I wonder where the other fellow is," he genially pursued, "it would seem that I've only to suppose him here in this room with me, in your interesting person." These words might have struck us as insidious enough just to trip up our young man, but his lucidity was in fact perfectly proof. "I didn't say, kindly understand, that we have _merged_ personalities, but that we have definitely exchanged them--which is a different matter. Our duality is so far from diminished that it's only the greater--by our formulation, each to the other, of the so marked difference in our interest. The man ridden by his curiosity about the Past _can't_, you'll grasp, be one and the same with the man ridden by his curiosity about the Future. He has given me his chance for this, while I have given him mine for that. Recognise accordingly," said Ralph, "that we're at the opposite poles--or at least in quite different places." It was wonderful more and more what the Ambassador _could_ recognise by the aid of his kind wise little intervals of thought and indulgences of contemplation. "Yes, yes--but if I of course see that you, as the distinct individual you are so fortunately able to claim to be, stand here delightfully before me, that doesn't in the least tell me where _he_ is located, as we say, in time and space." "Why, he's down at the door in the cab," Ralph returned with splendid simplicity. His host might have been lost for a moment in the sheer radiance of it--even to the point indeed of a gesture guarding against excess of impression or for that matter just gaining time. "Do you mean to say you're all this while keeping your hansom?" "It's not a hansom--in this eternal rain: it's a four-wheeler with the glasses up. And he only wants," our young man explained, "to wait as long as I require. So at least I understand," he remarked as an afterthought. "So that you'll find him--in his rather tried patience, it strikes me--when you go down? And I should have the pleasure of seeing him too," the Ambassador further ventured, "if I were to go down with you?"