“As long as we thought he was a mere harmless lunatic, Jimmy,” said Mr. John Dobbs, “we didn’t so much mind your taking him up, although we all thought from the first that for a chap like you to do so was coming down a peg. But now that we find out that he is not a harmless lunatic at all, but a downright dangerous one, we think you owe it to yourself that you should give him the cold shoulder altogether.” To which expression of well-meaning wisdom Mr. Dodson rejoined tactfully, “I dare say you may be perfectly right, John. I shall have to think it over.” All the same in the inscrutable recesses of Mr. Dodson’s heart there was no clearly defined intention of acting upon this disinterested advice. Mr. James Dodson was preeminently a man of the world, “a two-and-two-makes-four” man, in his own phrase, yet a stealthy feeling had already taken root within him, which somehow forbade the philosopher to follow the dictates of pure reason with the implicit fidelity that was his wont. He had nothing to gain by association with such a person as William Jordan, Junior, for even his faculty of speaking Greek like a native, had by this time become a theme for derision among Mr. Dodson’s intimates; yet when the eminent worldling and philosopher came closely to scrutinize his own personal dealings with this very odd specimen of humanity, it began to appear that he was no longer his own master. “I feel, you know, Luney,” he confessed, in one of his moments of expansiveness, “I am behaving like a fool in taking you up like I do. I am acting against my own interests. You will never do anything; you are d----d unpopular with all my pals; you are not a bit bright or clever; you never drink or smoke or bet or make love to the ladies; you can’t hold your own even with a chap like young Davis; even when your leg is being pulled you haven’t got the sense to notice it; in short, Luney, and in a word, you are just a worm; but, somehow, there is an odd sort of something about you that I feel I can’t do without. What it is I don’t know. If you were a girl I should say it was love; and yet, my son, I’ll swear to you on my solemn oath that I don’t believe there is such a thing as love. All the talk about it, all the plays and penny novelettes about it, are the biggest bunkum imaginable.” However, in spite of many speeches as uncompromising as this, Mr. Dodson could not bring himself to relinquish his patronage of his strange companion. Seldom can a more incongruous pair have walked together along the perilous paths of the great nowhither, since the far-off days of the Knight of La Mancha and his faithful squire. And it chanced that on the eve of the very next Bank Holiday, which befell on a stifling day in August, when the town lay choked in dust and seemed to swoon with the arid air, Mr. Dodson made the proposal to his singular friend that they should go forth on that festal day and “see a bit of life” together.