"Well, I'm jolly glad that you've drifted my way at last. So you've been
to luncheon, have you?" Kemper enquired again, as he unfastened a button
of his overcoat and drew out his watch. "I wish you hadn't--I've
promised to meet a man at the club and it's past the hour. I say, look
here," he added hastily as he was about to hurry off, "I've some rather
decent rooms of my own now where I sometimes manage to get a quiet
morsel. Will you come to dine to-morrow at half-past seven, sharp?"

It took Adams hardly an instant to consider and accept the invitation.
Though he rarely dined out he felt a positive pleasure at the thought,
and when, a minute later, he walked on again, repeating the number of
the address which the other had pressed upon him, he found that Kemper's
greeting had left a trail of cheerfulness which lingered for at least a
half hour after the man himself had gone on his genial way. If, as Gerty
Bridewell had once declared in a fit of exasperation, "Arnold Kemper
consisted of a surface," he managed at least to present those mystifying
ripples of personality which suggest to the imagination depths of
pleasantness as yet undiscovered. Adams had lived to his present age by
the help of few illusions--and he realised even now that the thing he
liked in Kemper was an effect of manner which implied an impossible
subtlety--that the power one saw in the man was produced simply by some
trick of pose, by a frankness so big that one felt intuitively there
must be still bigger qualities behind it. Whether it was all a bluster
of affectation Adams had never as yet decided in his own mind, but
there were moments when, in listening to stories of the masculine
freedom in which Kemper lived, he felt inclined to acknowledge that the
force, whatever it was, had spent itself in wind. In a profession the
man would inevitably have become a figure, he thought now with a touch
of friendly humor--in law or medicine he would have gone in for the