Up to this point I had been looking into his face, but now I turned away.  Instinctively I felt that, if he were going to, speak of his transactions with Freedham, he would be abashed by my gaze.  He rested his elbows on his knees, and began to tie knot after knot in a piece of string.

“Freedham’s an extraordinary creature,” he proceeded.  “He first got hold of me when I was at the Nursery.  He would get me in a dark corner, and alternately pet and bully me.  I remember his once holding me in a frightful grip and saying:  ‘You’re so—­’ (I’m only telling you what he said, Rupert)—­’You’re so pretty that I’d love to see you cry.’  He’s that type, you know.”

For a while Doe, whose cheeks and neck were crimson, knotted his string in silence.

“Then he used to give me money to encourage me to like him, and dash it, Ray!  I do like him.  He’s got such weird, majestic ideas that are different from anyone else’s,—­and he attracts me.  His great theory is that Life is Sensation, and there must be no sensation—­a law, or no law—­which he has not experienced.  I believed him to be right (as I do still, in part) and we—­we tried everything together.  We—­we got drunk on a beastly occasion in his room.  We didn’t like it, but we pushed on, so as to find out what the sensation was.  And then—­oh!  I wish I’d never started telling you all this—­”

He tied a knot with such viciousness that few would have had the patience to untie it.

“Go on, old chap,” I said encouragingly.  I was proud of playing the sympathetic confidant; but, less natural than that, a certain abnormality in the conversation had stimulated me; I was excited to hear more.

“Well, he told me that years before he had wanted to see what taking drugs was like, and he had been taking them ever since.  He was mad keen on the subject and had read De Quincey and those people from beginning to end.  I’ve tried them with him....  There are not many things we haven’t done together.”

Doe tossed the string away.

“I know I might have done well in cricket, but Freedham used to say that excelling in games was good enough for Kipling’s ’flannelled fools’ and ‘muddied oafs.’  We thought we were superior, chosen people, who would excel in mysticism and intellectualism.”

As he said it, Doe looked up and smiled at me, while I sat, amazed to discover how far he, with his finer mind, had outstripped me in the realms of thought.  I had no idea what mysticism was.

“And I still think,” he pursued, “that Freedham’s got hold of the Truth, only perverted; just as he himself is a perversion.  Life is what feeling you get out of it; and the highest types of feeling are mystical and intellectual.  I only knew yesterday what a perversion he really was.  I saw something that I’d never seen before—­he had a sort of paroxysm—­like a bad rigor; something to do with the drug-habit, I s’pose—­”