As he stood there admiring it all with roving eyes, he was startled after a moment by the sudden, and as it seemed to him unannounced apparition of a man in a well-made grey tweed suit, just a yard or two in front of him.  He was aware of an intruder.  To be sure, there was nothing very remarkable at first sight either in the stranger’s dress, appearance, or manner.  All that Philip noticed for himself in the newcomer’s mien for the first few seconds was a certain distinct air of social superiority, an innate nobility of gait and bearing.  So much at least he observed at a glance quite instinctively.  But it was not this quiet and unobtrusive tone, as of the Best Society, that surprised and astonished him; Brackenhurst prided itself, indeed, on being a most well-bred and distinguished neighbourhood; people of note grew as thick there as heather or whortleberries.  What puzzled him more was the abstruser question, where on earth the stranger could have come from so suddenly.  Philip had glanced up the road and down the road just two minutes before, and was prepared to swear when he withdrew his eyes not a soul loomed in sight in either direction.  Whence, then, could the man in the grey suit have emerged?  Had he dropped from the clouds?  No gate opened into the road on either side for two hundred yards or more; for Brackenhurst is one of those extremely respectable villa neighbourhoods where every house—­an eligible family residence—­stands in its own grounds of at least six acres.  Now Philip could hardly suspect that so well dressed a man of such distinguished exterior would be guilty of such a gross breach of the recognised code of Brackenhurstian manners as was implied in the act of vaulting over a hedgerow.  So he gazed in blank wonder at the suddenness of the apparition, more than half inclined to satisfy his curiosity by inquiring of the stranger how the dickens he had got there.

A moment’s reflection, however, sufficed to save the ingenuous young man from the pitfall of so serious a social solecism.  It would be fatal to accost him.  For, mark you, no matter how gentlemanly and well-tailored a stranger may look, you can never be sure nowadays (in these topsy-turvy times of subversive radicalism) whether he is or is not really a gentleman.  That makes acquaintanceship a dangerous luxury.  If you begin by talking to a man, be it ever so casually, he may desire to thrust his company upon you, willy-nilly, in future; and when you have ladies of your family living in a place, you really cannot be too particular what companions you pick up there, were it even in the most informal and momentary fashion.  Besides, the fellow might turn out to be one of your social superiors, and not care to know you; in which case, of course, you would only be letting yourself in for a needless snubbing.  In fact, in this modern England of ours, this fatherland of snobdom, one passes one’s life in a see-saw of doubt, between the Scylla and Charybdis of those two antithetical social dangers.  You are always afraid you may get to know somebody you yourself do not want to know, or may try to know somebody who does not want to know you.