At last I met
him one day in Piccadilly, and we dined together at the Savoy. I hardly
recognized him, for he was become enormously stout, and his hair had
already grown thin. Though he could not have been more than twenty-five,
he looked considerably older. I tried to find out what he had been up to,
but, with the air of mystery he affects, he would go into no details. He
gave me to understand that he had sojourned in lands where the white man
had never been before, and had learnt esoteric secrets which overthrew
the foundations of modern science. It seemed to me that he had coarsened
in mind as well as in appearance. I do not know if it was due to my own
development since the old days at Oxford, and to my greater knowledge of
the world, but he did not seem to me so brilliant as I remembered. His
facile banter was rather stupid. In fact he bored me. The pose which had
seemed amusing in a lad fresh from Eton now was intolerable, and I was
glad to leave him. It was characteristic that, after asking me to dinner,
he left me in a lordly way to pay the bill.
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