It almost made him, as a person, not ring true. His rôle was too exact. Occasionally one would find one’s-self looking intently at his serious, childish face--and wondering if there were not something behind it besides a fund of geniality. He was too much of a cheerful background; too understanding of the weaknesses of his neighbors; and in his humor far too thorough not to be sometimes suspected to unreality. But it was a passing doubt at best, and quite conceivably the product of our imaginations as we looked backward from a later date. At any rate, he was enjoyed and respected as a very rare personage indeed: a friend of everyone alike, though no one in particular. You might have described him to a perfect stranger as “a very amusing person”, but if he was mentioned you really did not feel that way yourself. You did not think of him as a person at all, in fact, but as the thing he was, or stood for, as though he were the representative of something. But it seems that fate had written that the Pan Jandrum--the wise and genial Pan Jandrum--the Great Pan Jandrum himself, was riding, all this time, for a fall. Fortunately, I was away when it happened, as I should not like to have seen it. For it is certain I should have shared the curiously intense feeling of revulsion--or rather simply depression that settled upon the community afterward. Several things contributed to the effect of the event, chief of which was, of course, its publicity. Had he not chosen the particular evening he did to cast aside every vestige of self-control, no one might have known. But Mrs. Joe-Billy happened, on that winter night, to be giving a dinner at her big house up on the hill to which the Great Pan Jandrum had been invited, and from which he stayed, for a time, conspicuously and unaccountably absent. Whether he was accidentally started by some inadvertent friend, or whether he deliberately wished to enjoy himself, I do not know. Perhaps he was just tired of his heroic rôle: that is, of our ridiculous yet touching attitude toward him.