Perhaps there were no stages; we may have simply leaped by one bound at
that consummation. He had swung himself into my compartment as the train
was leaving the platform at Blackheath; so I suppose it was destiny.
After that I was tempted to conceive that he fastened on me as on
something that he had need of; but I think it was rather that I fell to
his mysterious attraction.

While we dined he informed me further that he had been reporting football
matches for six weeks. Before that he had been proof-reader for a firm of
printers for about a year. Before that he had been a compositor. And
before that again he had worked in an office with his father, who was
Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for some parish down in
Hertfordshire. He chucked that because he found that the registration of
births, marriages and deaths was spoiling his handwriting quite as much
as his handwriting was spoiling the registration of births, marriages and
deaths. (He was, he said, cultivating a careless, scholarly hand.) He
liked his present job, because it took him out pretty often into the open
air. Also he liked looking on at football matches and prize fights.

He said it made him feel manly.

You should have seen him sitting there and telling me these things in a
gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort
of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an
audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him,
mainly in the light of absurdity. You should have seen his face, its thin
cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that
had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed end in profile and
three-quarters, and turned suddenly all broad and blunt in a full view;
and his mouth that stood ajar with excitement, and even in moments of