Gregory his opinion of him; he would extinguish once and for all my interest in the subject.  He has been wholly unsuccessful at the bar; he lives in London lodgings, and I cannot conceive how he employs his time.  There is a club I sometimes visit (I fear I should visit it oftener if Gregory were not a member), where he sits like a moulting condor in a corner, or wanders about seeking a receptacle for his information.  I got him, as I have said, a piece of legal work; it was done, I believe, admirably; but the solicitor whom I referred to Gregory has since told me that he cannot employ him again.  “I simply have not the time,” he said; “our consultations took longer than I could have conceived possible; there was not a single contingency in heaven and earth that Gregory did not foresee and describe!”

This has gone on until Gregory has reached the mature age of fifty-five.  He has no work and no friend.  His relations cannot tolerate him.  He is a deeply aggrieved man, bitterly conscious of his failure, and the worst of it is that it has never yet occurred to him that he may be himself to blame.  He is so virtuous, so laborious, so just, so entirely free from faults of every kind, that he cannot possibly have even the grim satisfaction of self-censure.  He has instinctively obeyed every copy-book maxim that was ever written; he is one of the very few men who cannot sincerely join in the Confession, because it is impossible for him to say that he has done those things that he ought not to have done; and yet, with all his powers and virtues, he is simply a tragic failure.  No one has a word to say for him; he can get no work; he is an absolutely unnecessary person.  Yet there are positions which he could have held with credit.  He would have been an excellent clerk, and a competent official.  But now he is simply a briefless barrister, without a friend in the world.

He arrived very punctually to luncheon.  He is a small, sturdy man, with a big head, of a uniform, dull tint, as if it were carved out of a not very successfully boiled chicken.  He is bald, and wears spectacles.  He was rather primly dressed, and everything about him gave a sense of careful and virtuous economy, from the uncompromising hardness of his heavy grey suit to the emphatic solidity of his great boots.  I had two rather lively young men staying with me, and they behaved with remarkable kindness.  But Gregory put the garden-roller over us all in a very few minutes.  One of my young friends asked a silly question about current politics.  Gregory looked at him blankly, and said, “I am afraid that that question betrays a very superficial acquaintance with the elements of political economy.  May I ask if you picked that up at Cambridge?” He gave a short mirthless laugh, and I understood that he was trying his hand at a little light social badinage.  However, it flattened out my young friend, while Gregory ruthlessly told us the elements, and a good deal more