really professional--and I could fancy the lamentable lodgings in
which the Major would have been left alone. He could sit there
more or less grimly with his wife--he couldn't sit there anyhow
without her.

He had too much tact to try and make himself agreeable when he
couldn't be useful; so when I was too absorbed in my work to talk
he simply sat and waited. But I liked to hear him talk--it made my
work, when not interrupting it, less mechanical, less special. To
listen to him was to combine the excitement of going out with the
economy of staying at home. There was only one hindrance--that I
seemed not to know any of the people this brilliant couple had
known. I think he wondered extremely, during the term of our
intercourse, whom the deuce I DID know. He hadn't a stray sixpence
of an idea to fumble for, so we didn't spin it very fine; we
confined ourselves to questions of leather and even of liquor-
saddlers and breeches-makers and how to get excellent claret cheap-
-and matters like "good trains" and the habits of small game. His
lore on these last subjects was astonishing--he managed to
interweave the station-master with the ornithologist. When he
couldn't talk about greater things he could talk cheerfully about
smaller, and since I couldn't accompany him into reminiscences of
the fashionable world he could lower the conversation without a
visible effort to my level.

So earnest a desire to please was touching in a man who could so
easily have knocked one down. He looked after the fire and had an
opinion on the draught of the stove without my asking him, and I
could see that he thought many of my arrangements not half knowing.
I remember telling him that if I were only rich I'd offer him a