Sylvester sat in the sun at the edge of one of the parterres, flanked, on the one side, by an elderly matron chaperoning a line of laughing girls, and on the other by a white-moustached, red-faced Anglo-Indian laying down the law to a neighbour on the preparation of curry. Sylvester stared moodily at the parterre in front, separated from him by the pathway, and felt very lonely. Despite his loss of faith in man and woman, he hungered dumbly for the human companionship from which he shrank. The first sense of novelty over, his practice in London had failed to stimulate him. The interest was absorbing, but unthrilling. He began to realise that he was degenerating into a consulting and recording machine,--very sensitive, it is true, but a machine all the same. He lived alone in a formal house in Weymouth Street. In the morning he rose early, worked in his laboratory, saw patients, ate, saw more patients, worked again in his laboratory, ate, and till bedtime read or worked again among the endless test-tubes and retorts. And so, without change, day after day. His common-sense told him that it was not a healthy life for a human being. But how to alter it effectively save by mixing with his kind? And his kind was hateful to him. He had grown to be a recluse, misanthropically brooding over its worthlessness. Yet now and then, as today, instinct drove him into the crowd. He caught himself half envying the crowd's irresponsible gaiety. It was quite within his power, as far as external conditions were concerned, to become as one of those he saw and to surround himself with laughter-loving friends. He wondered vaguely what it would be like. “It's the proportion of turmeric that does it,” exclaimed his neighbour, in a more emphatic tone than he had hitherto used. “The only man I knew that had the secret was poor old Jack Hilton--you remember Jack Hilton--of the Guides? He ran off with Mrs. Algy Broadbent.” Sylvester shivered slightly. A cloud came before his eyes. Were all men dishonourable and all women faithless? Was all this refined and nicely civilised crowd rotten to its soul? He looked furtively around. Who could tell what Messalina lurked beneath yonder girl's pink and white skin and innocent fresh eyes, what villainy and meanness lay concealed beneath yonder young soldier's specious bearing of manliness? Disgust banished the haunting envy. A man who had been chattering to the girls on his left took leave of them with a great sweep of his hat. In the act of passing Sylvester, he stopped short and regarded him as though in astonishment. “_Trône de l'air!_ and by all the oaths of the vehement South, what are you doing here?” “How do you do, Roderick?” said Sylvester, rising and formally shaking hands. “Oh, I'm bursting with fatness, which is more than I can say for you. But what are you doing in this galley?” “Why shouldn't I be here?”