of Dante--and his
mind answered to it, up to a point. Fastidious is the word, . . .
gave you the impression he had attached himself to Natural Science
much as an old Florentine attached himself to theology or anatomy or
classics, with a kind of cold passion.

The queerest thing about him was that anything like "intellectual
society," as they call it, bored him stiff. Now you may believe it
or not, but I've always had a kind of crawling reverence for things
of the mind, and for men who go in for 'em. You can't think the
amount of poetry, for instance, I've read in my time, just wondering
how the devil it was done. But it's no use; it never was any use,
even in those days. No man of the kind I wanted to worship could
ever take me seriously. I remember once being introduced to a poet
whose stuff I knew by heart, almost every line of it, and when I
blurted out some silly enthusiasm--sort of thing a well-meaning
Philistine does say, don't you know?--he put the lid down on me with
"Now, that's most interesting. I've often wondered if what I write
appealed to one of your--er--interests, and if so, how."

Well that's where I always felt Foe could help. And yet he didn't
help very much. He read a heap of poetry--on the sly, as it were;
and one night I coaxed him off to a talk about Browning.
His language on the way home was three-parts blasphemy.

Am I making him at all clear to you? He kept his intellect in a cage
all to itself, so to speak. . . . What's more--and you'll see the
point of this by and by--he liked to keep his few friends in separate
cages. I won't say he was jealous: but if he liked A and B, it was
odds he'd be uneasy at A's liking B, or at any rate getting to like
him intimately.

This secretiveness had its value, to be sure. It gave you a sense of
being _privileged_ by his friendship. . . . Or, no; that's too
priggish for my meaning. Foe wasn't a bit of a prig. It was only
because he had, on his record already, so much brains that the
ordinary man who met him in my rooms was disposed to wonder how he
could be so good a fellow. Get into your minds, please, that he
_was_ a good fellow, and that no one doubted it; of the sort that
listens and doesn't speak out of his turn.

He had a great capacity for silence; and it's queer to me--since I've
thought over it--what a large share of our friendship consisted in
just sitting up into the small hours and smoking, and saying next to
nothing. _I_ ta