To Philip, this was all a rather serious matter.  He felt he was responsible for having introduced the mysterious Alien, however unwillingly, into the bosom of Robert Monteith’s family.  Now, Philip was not rich, and Frida was supposed to have “made a good match of it”—­that is to say, she had married a man a great deal wealthier than her own upbringing.  So Philip, after his kind, thought much of the Monteith connection.  He lived in lodgings at Brackenhurst, at a highly inconvenient distance from town, so as to be near their house, and catch whatever rays of reflected glory might fall upon his head like a shadowy halo from their horses and carriages, their dinners and garden-parties.  He did not like, therefore, to introduce into his sister’s house anybody that Robert Monteith, that moneyed man of oil, in the West African trade, might consider an undesirable acquaintance.  But as time wore on, and Bertram’s new clothes came home from the tailor’s, it began to strike the Civil Servant’s mind that the mysterious Alien, though he excited much comment and conjecture in Brackenhurst, was accepted on the whole by local society as rather an acquisition to its ranks than otherwise.  He was well off:  he was well dressed:  he had no trade or profession:  and Brackenhurst, undermanned, hailed him as a godsend for afternoon teas and informal tennis-parties.  That ineffable air of distinction as of one royal born, which Philip had noticed at once the first evening they met, seemed to strike and impress almost everybody who saw him.  People felt he was mysterious, but at any rate he was Someone.  And then he had been everywhere—­except in Europe; and had seen everything—­except their own society:  and he talked agreeably when he was not on taboos:  and in suburban towns, don’t you know, an outsider who brings fresh blood into the field—­who has anything to say we do not all know beforehand—­is always welcome!  So Brackenhurst accepted Bertram Ingledew before long, as an eccentric but interesting and romantic person.

Not that he stopped much in Brackenhurst itself.  He went up to town every day almost as regularly as Robert Monteith and Philip Christy.  He had things he wanted to observe there, he said, for the work he was engaged upon.  And the work clearly occupied the best part of his energies.  Every night he came down to Brackenhurst with his notebook crammed full of modern facts and illustrative instances.  He worked most of all in the East End, he told Frida confidentially:  there he could see best the remote results of certain painful English customs and usages he was anxious to study.  Still, he often went west, too; for the West End taboos, though not in some cases so distressing as the East End ones, were at times much more curiously illustrative and ridiculous.  He must master all branches of the subject alike.  He spoke so seriously that after a time Frida, who was just at first inclined to laugh at his odd way of putting things, began to take it all in the end quite as seriously as he did.  He felt more at home with her than with anybody else at Brackenhurst.  She had sympathetic eyes; and he lived on sympathy.  He came to her so often for help in his difficulties that she soon saw he really meant all he said, and was genuinely puzzled in a very queer way by many varied aspects of English society.