While the fact so declared may have been a fact, the young man’s corollary that the rector of St. Antipas sought this experience for the sake of its mere publicity came from a prejudice which closer acquaintance with Dr. Linford happily dissolved from his mind.  As reasonably might he have averred, as did another cynic, that the rector of St. Antipas was actuated by the instincts of a mountebank when he selected his evening papers each day—­deliberately and with kind words—­from the stock of a newswoman at a certain conspicuous and ever-crowded crossing.  As reasonable was the imputation of this other cynic, that in greeting friends upon the thronged avenue, the rector never failed to use some word or phrase that would identify him to those passing, giving the person addressed an unpleasant sense of being placed in a lime-light, yet reducing him to an insignificance just this side the line of obliteration.

“You say, ‘Ah, Doctor!’ and shake hands, you know,” said this hypercritical observer, “and, ten to one, he says something about St. Antipas directly, you know, or—­’Tell him to call on Dr. Linford at the rectory adjoining St. Antipas—­I’m always there at eleven,’ or ’Yes, quite true, the bishop said to me, “My dear Linford, we depend on you in this matter,"’ or telling how Mrs. General Somebody-Something, you know—­I never could remember names—­took him down dreadfully by calling him the most dangerously fascinating man in New York.  And there you are, you know!  It never fails, on my word!  And all the time people are passing and turning to stare and listen, you know, so that it’s quite rowdy—­saying ‘Yes—­that’s Linford—­there he is,’ quite as if they were on one of those coaches seeing New York; and you feel, by Jove, I give you my word, like the solemn ass who goes up on the stage to help the fellow do his tricks, you know, when he calls for ’some kind gentleman from the audience.’”

It may be told that this other person was of a cynicism hopelessly indurated.  Not so with Rigby Reeves, even after Reeves alleged the other discoveries that the rector of St. Antipas had “a walk that would be a strut, by gad! if he was as short as I am”; also that he “walked like a parade,” which, as expounded by Mr. Reeves, meant that his air in walking was that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal procession in his own honour; and again, that one might read in his eyes a keenly sensuous enjoyment in the tones of his own voice; that he coloured these with a certain unction corresponding to the flourishes with which people of a certain obliquity of mind love to ornament their chirography; still again that he, Reeves, was “ready to lay a bet that the fellow would continue to pose even at the foot of the Great White Throne.”