He had reason,
therefore, to be as grateful to me as I to him. Each of us, not the
less frankly because silently, recognized his obligation to the other.
And when, on the last evening of my stay, the ice actually was broken
there was no ill-will between us: neither of us was to blame.

It was a Sunday evening. I had been out for a long last walk and had
come in very late to dinner. Laider had left his table almost directly
after I sat down to mine. When I entered the smoking-room I found him
reading a weekly review which I had bought the day before. It was a
crisis. He could not silently offer nor could I have silently
accepted, six-pence. It was a crisis. We faced it like men. He made,
by word of mouth, a graceful apology. Verbally, not by signs, I
besought him to go on reading. But this, of course, was a vain counsel
of perfection. The social code forced us to talk now. We obeyed it
like men. To reassure him that our position was not so desperate as it
might seem, I took the earliest opportunity to mention that I was going
away early next morning. In the tone of his "Oh, are you?" he tried
bravely to imply that he was sorry, even now, to hear that. In a way,
perhaps, he really was sorry. We had got on so well together, he and
I. Nothing could efface the memory of that. Nay, we seemed to be
hitting it off even now. Influenza was not our sole theme. We passed
from that to the aforesaid weekly review, and to a correspondence that
was raging therein on faith and reason.

This correspondence had now reached its fourth and penultimate
stage--its Australian stage. It is hard to see why these
correspondences spring up; one only knows that they do spring up,
suddenly, like street crowds. There comes, it would seem, a moment
when the whole English-speaking race is unconsciously bursting to have
its say about some one thing--the split infinitive, or the habits of
migratory birds, or faith and reason, or what-not. Whatever weekly
review happens at such a moment to contain a reference, however remote,
to the theme in question reaps the storm. Gusts of letters come in
from all corners of the British Isles. These are presently reinforced
by Canada in full blast. A few weeks later the Anglo-Indians weigh in.
In due course we have the help of our Australian cousins. By that
time, however, we of the mother country have got our second wind, and
so determined are we to make the most of it that at last even