Page:Walpole--portrait of man with red hair.djvu/32

 Like the hero of "Flegeljahre," he "loved every dog and wanted every dog to love him," but the dogs did not know enough about him to be interested; he was so like so many other immaculately-dressed, pleasant-mannered, and wandering American cosmopolitans that nobody had any permanent feeling for him—fathered by Henry James, uncled by Howells, aunted (severely) by Edith Wharton—one of a million cultured, kindly impersonal Americans seen as shadows by the matter-of-fact unimaginative British. Who knew or cared that he was lonely, longing for love, for home, for some one to whom he might give his romantic devotion? He was all these things, but no one minded.

And then he met James Maradick.

The meeting was of the simplest. At the Reform Club one day he was lunching with two men, one a novelist, Westcott, whom he knew very slightly, the other a fellow American. Westcott, a dark thick-set man of about forty, with a reputation that without being sensational was solid and well merited, said very little. Harkness liked him and recognised in him a kindly shyness rather like his own. After luncheon they moved into the big smoking-room upstairs to drink their coffee.

A large, handsome man of between fifty and sixty came up and spoke to Westcott. He was obvious-