ographs of actresses for me!... Well, suppose he didn't like the
things I bought for him? Suppose our tastes didn't agree? Should I have
to try and suit his, or would he have to put up with mine?"

"There's only one taste in the matter," Urquhart told him. "He hasn't got
any. You could buy him any old thing and tell him it was good and he'd
believe you, provided it cost enough. That's why he has to have a buyer
honest though poor--he couldn't check him in the least. I shall tell him
that, however many the things you might lie about, you are a George
Washington where your precious bric-a-brac is concerned, because it's
the one thing you care about too much to take it flippantly."

Peter chuckled again. Life, having for a little while drifted perilously
near to the shores of dullness, again bobbed merrily on the waters of
farce. What a lot of funny things there were, all waiting to be done!
This that Urquhart suggested should certainly, if possible, be one of
them.

A week later, when Mr. Leslie had written to engage Peter's services,
Urquhart's second cousin Rodney came into Peter's room (a thing he had
never done before, because he did not know Peter much) and said, "But why
not start a curiosity shop of your own? Or be a travelling pedlar? It
would be so much more amusing."

Peter felt a little flattered. He liked Rodney, who was in his third year
and had never before taken any particular notice of him. Rodney was a
rather brilliant science man; he was also an apostle, a vegetarian, a
fine football player, an ex-Fabian, and a few other things. He was a
large, emaciated-looking person, with extraordinarily bright grey eyes,
inspiring a lean, pale, dark-browed face--the face of an ascetic, lit by
a flame of energising life. He looked as if he would spend and be spent
by it to the last charred fragment, in pursuit of the idea. There was
nothing in his vivid aspect of Peter Margerison's gentle philosophy of
acquiescence; he looked as if he would to the end dictate terms to life
rather than accept them--an attitude combined oddly with a view which
regarded the changes and chances of circumstance as more or less
irrelevant to life's vital essence.

Peter didn't know why Rodney wanted him to be a travelling pedlar--except
that, as he had anyhow once been a Socialist, he presumably disliked the
rich (ignorant or otherwise) and included Leslie among them. Peter always
had a vague feeling that Rodney did not wholly appreciat