he be offended, when he will generally indite your name with a studious
precision and a distant grace quite foreign to his ordinary caligraphy.

These reflections, trite enough as I know, are nevertheless inevitable
if one is to begin one's unheroic story in the modern manner, at the
latest possible point. That is clearly the point at which a waiter
brought me the fatal letter from Catherine Evers. Apart even from its
immediate consequences, the letter had a _prima facie_ interest, of no
ordinary kind, as the first for years from a once constant
correspondent. And so I sat studying the envelope with a curiosity too
piquant not to be enjoyed. What in the world could so obsolete a friend
find to say to one now? Six months earlier there had been a certain
opportunity for an advance, which at that time could not possibly have
been misconstrued; when they landed me, a few later, there was another
and perhaps a better one. But this was the last summer of the late
century, and already I was beginning to get about like a lamplighter on
my two sticks. Now, young men about town, on two walking-sticks, in the
year of grace 1900, meant only one thing. Quite a stimulating thing in
the beginning, but even as I write, in this the next winter but one, a
national irritation of which the name alone might prevent you from
reading another word.

Catherine's handwriting, on the contrary, was still stimulating, if
indeed I ever found it more so in the foolish past. It had not altered
in the least. There was the same sweet pedantry of the Attic _e_, the
same superiority to the most venial abbreviation, the same inconsistent
forest of exclamatory notes, thick as poplars across the channel. The
present plantation started after my own Christian name, to wit "Dear
Duncan!!" Yet there was nothing Germanic in Catherine's ancestry; it was
only her apologetic little way of addressing me as though nothing had