to whom the Five Towns was nothing but a delay.  I envied them.  I wanted to return to the shelter of the train.  When it left, I fancied that my last link with civilization was broken.  Then another train puffed in, and it was simply taken by assault in a fraction of time, to an incomprehensible bawling of friendly sociable porters.  Season-ticket holders at Finsbury Park think they know how to possess themselves of a train; they are deceived.  So this is where Simon Fuge came from (I reflected)!  The devil it is (I reflected)!  I tried to conceive what the invaders of the train would exclaim if confronted by one of Simon Fuge’s pictures.  I could imagine only one word, and that a monosyllable, that would meet the case of their sentiments.  And his dalliance, his tangential nocturnal deviations in gondolas with exquisite twin odalisques!  There did not seem to be much room for amorous elegance in the lives of these invaders.  And his death!  What would they say of his death?  Upon my soul, as I stood on that dirty platform, in a milieu of advertisements of soap, boots, and aperients, I began to believe that Simon Fuge never had lived, that he was a mere illusion of his friends and his small public.  All that I saw around me was a violent negation of Simon Fuge, that entity of rare, fine, exotic sensibilities, that perfectly mad gourmet of sensations, that exotic seer of beauty.

I caught sight of my acquaintance and host, Mr Robert Brindley, coming towards me on the platform.  Hitherto I had only met him in London, when, as chairman of the committee of management of the Wedgwood Institution and School of Art at Bursley, he had called on me at the British Museum for advice as to loan exhibits.  He was then dressed like a self-respecting tourist.  Now, although an architect by profession, he appeared to be anxious to be mistaken for a sporting squire.  He wore very baggy knickerbockers, and leggings, and a cap.  This raiment was apparently the agreed uniform of the easy classes in the Five Towns; for in the crowd I had noticed several such consciously superior figures among the artisans.  Mr Brindley, like most of the people in the station, had a slightly pinched and chilled air, as though that morning he had by inadvertence omitted to don those garments which are not seen.  He also, like most of the people there, but not to the same extent, had a somewhat suspicious and narrowly shrewd regard, as who should say:  ’If any person thinks he can get the better of me by a trick, let him try—­that’s all.’  But the moment his eye encountered mine, this expression vanished from his face, and he gave me a candid smile.

‘I hope you’re well,’ he said gravely, squeezing my hand in a sort of vice that he carried at the end of his right arm.

I reassured him.

‘Oh, I’m all right,’ he said, in response to the expression of my hopes.

It was a relief to me to see him.  He took charge of me.  I felt, as it were, safe in his arms.  I perceived that, unaided and unprotected, I should never have succeeded in reaching Bursley from Knype.