But he saw through it.  I don’t know how he managed to convey to me that my delicacy needn’t suffer.  Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. (And he was.) These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months.  (Yes; in less than six months he was holding me up, again, in my own paper.  I had to wait till he was “out” before I could get in.) He didn’t seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be him.

All this I remember.  But I cannot remember by what stages we arrived at dining together, as we did that night in a little restaurant in Soho.  Perhaps there were no stages; we may have simply leaped by one bound at that consummation.  He had swung himself into my compartment as the train was leaving the platform at Blackheath; so I suppose it was destiny.  After that I was tempted to conceive that he fastened on me as on something that he had need of; but I think it was rather that I fell to his mysterious attraction.

While we dined he informed me further that he had been reporting football matches for six weeks.  Before that he had been proof-reader for a firm of printers for about a year.  Before that he had been a compositor.  And before that again he had worked in an office with his father, who was Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for some parish down in Hertfordshire.  He chucked that because he found that the registration of births, marriages and deaths was spoiling his handwriting quite as much as his handwriting was spoiling the registration of births, marriages and deaths. (He was, he said, cultivating a careless, scholarly hand.) He liked his present job, because it took him out pretty often into the open air.  Also he liked looking on at football matches and prize fights.

He said it made him feel manly.

You should have seen him sitting there and telling me these things in a gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him, mainly in the light of absurdity.  You should have seen his face, its thin cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed end in profile and three-quarters, and turned suddenly all broad and blunt in a full view; and his mouth that stood ajar with excitement, and even in moments of quiescence failed to hide the tips of two rather prominent white teeth pressed down on the lower lip.  I don’t say there was anything unmanly about Jevons’s figure (he wasn’t noticeably undersized), or about his mouth and jaw.  I knew a great General with a mouth and jaw like that, and he was one of the handsomest figures in the Service.  I’m not hinting at anything like effeminacy in Jevons, only at a certain oddity that really saved him.  If he’d been handsome he’d have been dreadful.  His flush, his decorative eyes, his dark eyebrows and eyelashes, his sleek, light brown hair, would have made him vulgar.  As it was, his queerness gave them a sort of point.