ered that Captain
Macedoine belonged to that class of raconteurs who do not believe in
reticence on personal matters. I have very little of that sort of
squeamishness myself, but he was much more confidential. If confidential
is the word. Because there was no atmosphere of confession about his
story. He frequently interjected the words, 'you know,' and it really
seemed as if he assumed that we did know, and was just amusing himself.
Or perhaps he was rehearsing for the day of judgment. No matter. He ran
on. And we listened. We were interrupted once, when an elderly person,
'My housekeepah,' as he called her, 'Madame Petronita,' came in with
some sustaining liquid in a basin. And if you ask me what he talked
about, I should say that he furnished us with a large number of details
of his private life which the majority of us never mention even though
we may not be ashamed of them. At this distance of time it presents to
me the sort of memory which one retains of an interesting book read
long ago. I remember him, you see, because of what happened afterward,
because he was the father of this girl of whom I am telling you, and I
recall the picture of him dispensing those amiable garrulities because
it was as we sat there that the notion first came to me that he was
really an original artist working upon himself and concealing himself
behind the grandiose presentment of an impossibly superior and effulgent
human being. All I had known of him or heard of him in the old days
corroborated this notion of mine. 'We are a very old family, you know--I
was a younger son, you know--I was at Charterhouse School, you know--we
were very poor--a scholarship boy, you know.' This was addressed to a
certain extent to me, as an Englishman, of course, but the glamour of
his rich intonation enveloped those two beautiful women, mother and
daughter, sitting there with their perfect parted lips and their
extraordinarily seductive Slavonic eyes. It would be interesting, no
doubt, to know just what they imagined lay in the portentous statement
that Captain Macedoine had been sent as a poor boy--a day boy, he
informed us meticulously--to that ancient foundation known as the
Charterhouse--they with their oriental antecedents, their untrammelled
comprehension of the romantic value of life, and their initiation into
western ways in a Brooklyn apartment. Yet I'm not sure that deep did
not call into deep, that they did not succeed in getting hold of his
rea