bout
the weather. Then we had talked for about an hour about politics and
God; for men always talk about the most important things to total
strangers. It is because in the total stranger we perceive man himself;
the image of God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts
of the wisdom of a moustache.

One of the most interesting of Basil's motley group of acquaintances was
Professor Chadd. He was known to the ethnological world (which is a very
interesting world, but a long way off this one) as the second greatest,
if not the greatest, authority on the relations of savages to language.
He was known to the neighbourhood of Hart Street, Bloomsbury, as a
bearded man with a bald head, spectacles, and a patient face, the face
of an unaccountable Nonconformist who had forgotten how to be angry. He
went to and fro between the British Museum and a selection of blameless
tea-shops, with an armful of books and a poor but honest umbrella. He
was never seen without the books and the umbrella, and was supposed (by
the lighter wits of the Persian MS. room) to go to bed with them in his
little brick villa in the neighbourhood of Shepherd's Bush. There
he lived with three sisters, ladies of solid goodness, but sinister
demeanour. His life was happy, as are almost all the lives of methodical
students, but one would not have called it exhilarating. His only hours
of exhilaration occurred when his friend, Basil Grant, came into the
house, late at night, a tornado of conversation.

Basil, though close on sixty, had moods of boisterous babyishness, and
these seemed for some reason or other to descend upon him particularly
in the house of his studious and almost dingy friend. I can remember
vividly (for I was acquainted with both parties and often dined with
them) the gaiety of Grant on that particular evening when the strange
calamity fell upon the professor. Professor Chadd was, like most of
his particular class and type (the class that is at once academic and
middle-class), a Radical of a solemn and old-fashioned type. Grant was
a Radical himself, but he was that more discriminating and not uncommon
type of Radical who passes most of his time in abusing the Radical
party. Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called "Zulu
Interests and the New Makango Frontier', in which a precise scientific
report of his study of the customs of the people of T'Chaka was
reinforced by a severe protest against certain interferenc