"No, I hadn't," I answered. "Your Christian name was Minor. You never
had any other!" He smiled kindly. "But what on earth are you doing
here?"

Octave Boissy was a very wealthy man. He even looked a very wealthy man.
He was one of the darlings of success and of an absurdly luxurious
civilization. And he seemed singularly out of place in the vast, banal
foyer of the Hôtel Terminus, among the shifting, bustling crowd of
utterly ordinary, bourgeois, moderately well-off tourists and travellers
and needy touts. He ought at least to have been in a very select private
room at the Meurice or the Bristol, if in any hotel at all!

"The fact is, I'm neurasthenic," he said simply, just as if he had been
saying, "The fact is, I've got a wooden leg."

"Oh!" I laughed, determined to treat him as Boissy Minor, and not as
Octave Boissy.

"I have a morbid horror of walking in the open air. And yet I cannot
bear being in a small enclosed space, especially when it's moving. This
is extremely inconvenient. _Mais que veux-tu?... Suis comme ça!_"

"_Je te plains_" I put in, so as to return his familiar and flattering
"thou" immediately.

"I was strongly advised to go and stay in the country," he went on, with
the same serious, wistful simplicity, "and so I ordered a special saloon
carriage on the railway, so as to have as much breathing room as
possible; and I ventured from my house to this station in an auto. I
thought I could surely manage that. But I couldn't! I had a terrible