"Kilner, my name," said the owner of it. "I've noticed you, walking about in a hungry dream. Down on your luck? So am I. Best of luck in a way. When the world doesn't want you, it gives you time to look at it and think about it, and discover that it is really good. Otherwise you have to take so much on hearsay, and then of course you are not entitled to have an opinion about it, much less any feeling." "I was just beginning to feel extraordinarily happy about it all, though I have come to grief, and am a source of great anxiety to my friends." "Friends? They never want anything but one's external comfort. They will dine with you, walk with you, talk with you, sleep with you, but think with you, feel with you, they will not. It's not their fault. They don't want to be anything but charming. We who want charm only with truth find ourselves in trouble in no time at all. What did you try to do?" "I got married." "Oh! Is that all? I thought you must be a painter or a writer or--I'm a painter. But I can't sell a damn thing, so I work for a furniture-dealer until I've saved enough to keep me going for a few months. Come up and talk." They went up to No. 16. Kilner produced cigarettes and continued: "I'd have bet any amount you were an out-of-work writer, or a young man slung out of a respectable house for reading poetry in church. You don't look like the sort of fool who gets messed up by women, though almost any man is that kind of fool." René tried to protest against that, and to point out that he had been married and therefore serious in his folly, if folly it were. Kilner only grunted at him. "H'm!" he said. "Looks as if you'd been in the habit of taking things seriously simply because they happened to yourself. That's idiotic. Most things that happen are dirty little jokes, opportunities fumbled because one isn't fit to handle them, or situations forced out of greed or conceit, or injured vanity, or mere pigheadedness. There are divine things happen: doing a good bit of drawing is one of them, finding a friend is another, falling in love is another. Those things happen simply because you can't help doing them, because you'd die one of many deaths if you didn't. Once you've done one of those things, nothing else matters. You have something in you that you must keep alive. Let the others make the world hideous and vulgar and untidy. It is not your affair. If they won't or can't love what you love, then they are not for you and you are not for them. Don't you think?" René could find nothing to say. He found it so absorbing to watch Kilner, to listen to his monologue delivered in a voice of wonderful sweetness that seemed always to be trembling into laughter. The zest, the humor of the man thrilled through him, and made him feel that all his life was full of promise, rich and ripe with romance.