dia Dock Road.
The Professor, who seemed to know his way about the neighbourhood,
proceeded to a place where the line of lighted shops fell back into a
sort of abrupt twilight and quiet, in which an old white inn, all out of
repair, stood back some twenty feet from the road.

"You can find good English inns left by accident everywhere, like
fossils," explained the Professor. "I once found a decent place in the
West End."

"I suppose," said Syme, smiling, "that this is the corresponding decent
place in the East End?"

"It is," said the Professor reverently, and went in.

In that place they dined and slept, both very thoroughly. The beans and
bacon, which these unaccountable people cooked well, the astonishing
emergence of Burgundy from their cellars, crowned Syme's sense of a new
comradeship and comfort. Through all this ordeal his root horror had
been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between
isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians
that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand
times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world
will always return to monogamy.

Syme was able to pour out for the first time the whole of his outrageous
tale, from the time when Gregory had taken him to the little tavern by
the river. He did it idly and amply, in a luxuriant monologue, as a
man speaks with very old friends. On his side, also, the man who had
impersonated Professor de Worms was not less communicative. His own
story was almost as silly as Syme's.

"That's a good get-up of yours," said Syme, draining a glass of Macon;
"a lot better than old Gogol's. Even at the start I thought he was a bit
too hairy."

"A difference of artistic theory," replied the Professor pensively.
"Gogol was an idealist. He made up as the abstract or platonic ideal of
an anarchist. But I am a realist. I am a portrait painter. But, indeed,
to say that I am a portrait painter is an inadequate expression. I am a
portrait."

"I don't understand you," said Syme.

"I am a portrait," repeated the Professor. "I am a portrait of the
celebrated Professor de Worms, who is, I believe, in Naples."

"You mean you are made up like him," said Syme. "But doesn't he know
that you are taking his nose in vain?"

"He knows it right enough," replied his friend cheerfully.

"Then why doesn't he denounce you?"

"I have denounced him," answered the Professor.

"Do expl