To your eye, now, he would seem the strangest figure, in the utter disregard of all physical beauty or dignity about him.  You would find him extraordinarily odd, but in the old days he met not only with acceptance but respect.  He was alive until within a year or so ago, but his later appearance changed.  As I saw him that afternoon he was a very slovenly, ungainly little human being indeed, not only was his clothing altogether ugly and queer, but had you stripped the man stark, you would certainly have seen in the bulging paunch that comes from flabby muscles and flabbily controlled appetites, and in the rounded shoulders and flawed and yellowish skin, the same failure of any effort toward clean beauty.  You had an instinctive sense that so he had been from the beginning.  You felt he was not only drifting through life, eating what came in his way, believing what came in his way, doing without any vigor what came in his way, but that into life also he had drifted.  You could not believe him the child of pride and high resolve, or of any splendid passion of love.  He had just happened. . .  But we all happened then.  Why am I taking this tone over this poor little curate in particular?

“Hello!” he said, with an assumption of friendly ease.  “Haven’t seen you for weeks!  Come in and have a gossip.”

An invitation from the drawing-room lodger was in the nature of a command.  I would have liked very greatly to have refused it, never was invitation more inopportune, but I had not the wit to think of an excuse.  “All right,” I said awkwardly, and he held the door open for me.

“I’d be very glad if you would,” he amplified.  “One doesn’t get much opportunity of intelligent talk in this parish.”

What the devil was he up to, was my secret preoccupation.  He fussed about me with a nervous hospitality, talking in jumpy fragments, rubbing his hands together, and taking peeps at me over and round his glasses.  As I sat down in his leather-covered armchair, I had an odd memory of the one in the Clayton dentist’s operating-room—­I know not why.

“They’re going to give us trouble in the North Sea, it seems,” he remarked with a sort of innocent zest.  “I’m glad they mean fighting.”

There was an air of culture about his room that always cowed me, and that made me constrained even on this occasion.  The table under the window was littered with photographic material and the later albums of his continental souvenirs, and on the American cloth trimmed shelves that filled the recesses on either side of the fireplace were what I used to think in those days a quite incredible number of books—­perhaps eight hundred altogether, including the reverend gentleman’s photograph albums and college and school text-books.  This suggestion of learning was enforced by the little wooden shield bearing a college coat-of-arms that hung over the looking-glass, and by a photograph of Mr. Gabbitas in cap and gown in an Oxford frame that adorned the opposite wall.  And in the middle of that wall stood his writing-desk, which I knew to have pigeon-holes when it was open, and which made him seem not merely cultured but literary.  At that he wrote sermons, composing them himself!