Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/123

Rh He stood at the threshold of the door, left open indeed, so that he had only to walk over. By the end of the week he had proposed.

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was at his club, one day of the following year, that he next came upon his old friend, whom he had believed, turning the matter often round, he should—in time, though the time might be long—inevitably meet again on some ground socially workable. That the time might be long had been indicated by a circumstance that came up again as soon as, fairly face to face, they fell, in spite of everything, to talking together. 'Ah, you will speak to me then.' said Chilver, 'though you don't answer my letters!'

Braddle showed a strange countenance, partly accounted for by the fact that he was brown, seasoned, a trifle battered, and had almost grown thin. But he had still his good monocular scowl, on the strength of which—it was really so much less a threat than a positive appeal from a supersubtle world—any old friend, recognising it again, would take almost anything from him. Yes indeed, quite anything, Chilver felt after they had been a few minutes together: he had become so quickly conscious of pity, of all sorts of allowances, and this had already operated as such a quickener of his private happiness. He had immediately proposed that they should look for a quiet corner, and they had found one in the smoking-room, always empty in the middle of the afternoon. Here it seemed to him that Braddle showed him what he himself had escaped. He had escaped being as he was—that was it: 'as he was' was a state that covered now, to Chilver's sense, such vast spaces of exclusion and privation. It wasn't exactly that he was haggard or ill; his case was perhaps even not wholly clear to him, and he had still all the rest of his resources; but he was miserably afloat, and he could only be for Chilver the