Page:Avon Fantasy Reader 17.djvu/44



by G. K. Chesterton

ASIL GRANT had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one anywhere, and talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm for that person's affairs. He went through the world, as it were, if he were always on top of an omnibus or waiting for a train. Most or these chance acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his life. A few here and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became his lifelong intimates, but there was an accidental look about all of them as if they were windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen from a goodstrain or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would be, let us say, a veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey; another a mild prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another a young captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains in the Lancers; another a small dentist from Fulham, in all reasonable certainty precisely like every other dentist from Fulham. Major Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these; Basil had made his acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel cloak-room about the right hat, a discussion which reduced the little major almost to a kind of masculine hysterics, the compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor and the scrupulosity of an old maid. They had gone home in a cab together and then dined with each other twice a week until they died I