a job was a sacred affair, the meaning of his existence.  He was a Mercury who took himself seriously.  The more remote and rough and uncomfortable and dangerous his mission, the more he liked it.  He had never spared himself.  He had been a model special correspondent ever ready at a moment’s notice to set off to the ends of the earth.  And now, all of a sudden, behold him declining a task after his own heart, and, as I gathered from Arbuthnot, of the greatest political significance, and thereby endangering his peculiar and honourable position on the paper.

“If it had been any other man alive who had turned us down like that,” said Arbuthnot, “we would have chucked him altogether.  In fact we didn’t tell him that we wouldn’t.”

It was very mysterious; all the more so because Jaffery had never been a man of mystery, like Adrian.  I went away wondering.  If it had occurred to me at the time that I was destined to play Boswell to Jaffery’s Johnson, perhaps I might have gone straight to him and demanded a solution of my difficulties.  As it was, in my unawakened condition, I did nothing of the kind.  I spent an hour or two looking up something in the British Museum, stopped at the bootmaker’s to give an order concerning Susan’s riding-boots (vide diary) and drove home to dinner, to a comfortable chat with Barbara, during which I gave her an account of the day’s doings, and eventually to the peaceful slumber of the contented and inoffensive man.

A fortnight or so passed before I saw Jaffery again.  Happening to be in Westminster in the forenoon—­I had come up to town on business—­I mounted to his cheerless eyrie in Victoria Street, and rang the bell.  A dingy servitor in a dress suit, on transient duty, admitted me, and I found Jaffery collarless and minus jacket and waistcoat, smoking a pipe in front of the fire.  It wasn’t even a good coal fire.  Some austere former tenant had installed an electric radiator in the once comfort-giving grate.  But Jaffery did not seem to mind.  The remains of breakfast were on the table which the dingy servitor began to clear.  Jaffery rose from the depths of his easy chair like an agile mammoth.

“Hullo, hullo, hullo!”

His usual greeting.  We shook hands and commended the weather.  When the alien attendant had departed, he began to curse London.  It was a hole for sick dogs, not for sound men.  He loathed its abominable suffocation.

“Then why the deuce do you stay in it?”

He shrugged his shoulders.  “I can’t do anything else.”

This gave me an opening to satisfy my curiosity.

“I understood you could have gone to Persia.”

He frowned and tugged his red beard.  “How did you know that?”

“Arbuthnot—­” I began.

“Arbuthnot?” he boomed angrily.  “What the blazes does he mean by telling you about my affairs?  I’ll punch his damned head!”

“Don’t,” said I.  “Your hands are so big and he’s so small.  You might hurt him.”