Page:Chesterton - The Club of Queer Trades.djvu/151

Speculation of the House-Agent this raised another odd question about him. Slim and active as he was, he was no longer very young. His hair, indeed, was quite gray, though his rather wild almost Italian mustache retained its blackness, and his face was careworn under its almost Italian gayety. To find a middle-aged man who had left the army at the primitive rank of lieutenant is unusual and not necessarily encouraging. With the more cautious and solid this fact, like his endless flitting, did the mysterious gentleman no good.

Lastly, he was a man who told the kind of adventures which win a man admiration but not respect. They came out of queer places, where a good man would scarcely find himself, out of opium-dens and gambling-hells; they had the heat of the thieves' kitchens or smelled of a strange smoke from cannibal incantations. These are the kind of stories which discredit a person almost equally whether they are believed or no. If Keith's tales were false he was a liar; if they were true he had had, at any rate, every opportunity of being a scamp. 133