unexpected and delightful adventure. And he never feels, as I always do,
that a five minutes' conversation is a stupid, embarrassing thing, too
long for mere civility and too short for anything else. The five minutes
are filled to the brim and off he rushes again, leaving me just a little
more tired and leisurely from the contact. Delancey is the life and soul
of a party--or perhaps I should say the life and body. He likes eating
and drinking and talking to women and talking to men and smoking and
telling a story. And if he does address his neighbour a little as if she
were a meeting at a bye-election, open air, he at any rate never
addresses her as if she were a duty and no one had ever wanted to kiss
her.

To Delancey all women have had lovers and husbands and children and
religious conversions and railway accidents. Old maids and clergymen's
wives adore him.

I don't know what it was that made him write originally. Perhaps it was
his name--Delancey Woburn sounds like the author--or the hero--of a
serial. Or it may have been that his exuberant desire for
self-expression had burst through the four walls of practical
professions. He had, I believe, considered the stage and the church.
Journalism would have seemed to me the obvious outlet but he preferred
literature. "Creation is such _fun_," he would explain, beaming. And, of
course, he was tremendously successful. Delancey was designed on a
pattern of success.

That was one of the obvious defects I was talking about. Delancey has
missed his failures. He has fought and been defeated but he has never
longed and been frustrated. In his case, romance is realism. He has only
known happy endings.