head positively smoked.  Nothing mysterious prevented me from going away:  curiosity is the most obvious of sentiments, and it held me there to see the effect of a full information upon that young fellow who, hands in pockets, and turning his back upon the sidewalk, gazed across the grass-plots of the Esplanade at the yellow portico of the Malabar Hotel with the air of a man about to go for a walk as soon as his friend is ready.  That’s how he looked, and it was odious.  I waited to see him overwhelmed, confounded, pierced through and through, squirming like an impaled beetle—­and I was half afraid to see it too—­if you understand what I mean.  Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness.  The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense; it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush—­from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe.  We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive—­survive the condemnation, survive the halter, by Jove!  And there are things—­they look small enough sometimes too—­by which some of us are totally and completely undone.  I watched the youngster there.  I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us.  He stood there for all the parentage of his kind, for men and women by no means clever or amusing, but whose very existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage.  I don’t mean military courage, or civil courage, or any special kind of courage.  I mean just that inborn ability to look temptations straight in the face—­a readiness unintellectual enough, goodness knows, but without pose—­a power of resistance, don’t you see, ungracious if you like, but priceless—­an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature and the seductive corruption of men—­backed by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the contagion of example, to the solicitation of ideas.  Hang ideas!  They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

’This has nothing to do with Jim, directly; only he was outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of intelligence and the perversions of—­of nerves, let us say.  He was the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of the deck—­figuratively and professionally