days--he had to tell me that his employer didn't receive, I half
expected to hear him say after a moment "Do you think I ought to,
sir, in his place?"--as he might have asked me, with the return of
autumn, if I thought he had better light the drawing-room fire.

He had a resigned philosophic sense of what his guests--our guests,
as I came to regard them in our colloquies--would expect. His
feeling was that he wouldn't absolutely have approved of himself as
a substitute for Mr. Offord; but he was so saturated with the
religion of habit that he would have made, for our friends, the
necessary sacrifice to the divinity. He would take them on a
little further and till they could look about them. I think I saw
him also mentally confronted with the opportunity to deal--for once
in his life--with some of his own dumb preferences, his limitations
of sympathy, WEEDING a little in prospect and returning to a purer
tradition. It was not unknown to me that he considered that toward
the end of our host's career a certain laxity of selection had
crept in.

At last it came to be the case that we all found the closed door
more often than the open one; but even when it was closed
Brooksmith managed a crack for me to squeeze through; so that
practically I never turned away without having paid a visit. The
difference simply came to be that the visit was to Brooksmith. It
took place in the hall, at the familiar foot of the stairs, and we
didn't sit down, at least Brooksmith didn't; moreover it was
devoted wholly to one topic and always had the air of being already
over--beginning, so to say, at the end. But it was always
interesting--it always gave me something to think about. It's true
that the subject of my meditation was ever the same--ever "It's all