t.
Adrian was a bit unaccountable. He wrote poems for the Cambridge Review,
and became Vice-President of the Union; but he ran disastrously to fancy
waistcoats, and shuddered at Dickens because his style was not that of
Walter Pater. For myself, Hilary Freeth--well--I am a happy nonentity. I
have a very mild scholarly taste which sufficient private means,
accruing to me through my late father's acumen in buying a few founder's
shares in a now colossal universal providing emporium, enable me to
gratify. I am a harmless person of no account. But the other three
mattered. They were definite--Jaffery, blatantly definite; Adrian
Boldero, in his queer, silky way, incisively definite; Tom Castleton,
romantically definite. And poor old Tom was dead. Dear, impossible,
feckless fellow. He took a first class in the Classical Tripos and we
thought his brilliant career was assured--but somehow circumstances
baffled him; he had a terrible time for a dozen years or so, taking
pupils, acting, free-lancing in journalism, his father having, in the
meanwhile, died suddenly penniless; and then Fortune smiled on him. He
secured a professorship at an Australian University. The three of
us--Jaffery and Adrian and I--saw him off at Southampton. He never
reached Australia. He died on the voyage. Poor old Tom!

So I sat, with the review of Adrian's book before me, looking out at my
Pleasant garden, and my mind went irresistibly back to the old days and
then wandered on to the present. Tom was dead: I flourished, a
comfortable cumberer of the earth; Jaffery was doing something
idiotically desperate somewhere or the other--he was a war-correspondent
by trade (as regular an employment as that of the maker of hot-cross
buns), and a desperado by predilection--I had not heard from him for a
year; and now Adrian--if indeed the Adrian Boldero of the review was
he--had written an epoch-making novel.

But Adrian--the precious, finnikin Adrian--how on earth could he have
written this same epoch-making novel? Beyond doubt he was a clever
fellow. He had obtained a First Class in the Law Tripos and had done
well in his Bar examination. But after fourteen years or so he was
making twopence halfpenny per annum at his profession. He made another
three-farthings, say, by selling elegant verses to magazines. He dined
out a great deal and spent much of his time at country houses, being a
very popular and agreeable person. His other means of livelihood
consisted o