on ever since.  He married a nice wife; he secured a good official position.  Last night, as I say, I met him here.  He came into the room with the same old pleasant smile, beautifully dressed, soberly appointed.  His look and gestures were perfectly natural and appropriate.  He has never made any attempt to see me or keep up old acquaintance; but here, where I have a certain standing and position, it was obviously the right thing to treat me with courteous deference.  He came up to me with a genial welcome, and, but for a little touch of prosperous baldness, I could have imagined that he was hardly a day older than when he was a boy.  He reminded me of some cheerful passages of boyhood; he asked with kindly interest after my work; he paid me exactly the right compliments; and I became aware that I was, for the moment, one of the pawns in his game, to be delicately pushed about where it suited him.  We talked of other matters; he held exactly the right political opinions, a mild and cautious liberalism; he touched on the successes of certain politicians and praised them appropriately; he deplored the failure of certain old friends in political life.  “A very good fellow,” he said of Hughes, “but just a little—­what shall I say?—­impracticable?” He had seen all the right plays, heard the right music, read the right books.  He deplored the obscurity of George Meredith, but added that he was an undoubted genius.  He confessed himself to be an ardent admirer of Wagner; he thought Elgar a man of great power; but he had not made up his mind about Strauss.  I found that “not making up his mind about” a person was one of his favourite expressions.  If he sees that some man is showing signs of vigour and originality in any department of life, he keeps his eye upon him; if he passes safely through the shallows, he praises him, saying that he has watched his rise; if he fails, our friend will be ready with the reasons for his failure, adding that he always feared that so-and-so was a little unpractical.

I can’t describe to you the dreariness and oppression that fell upon me.  The total absence of generosity, of independent interest, weighed on my soul.  The one quality that this equable and judicious critic was on the look-out for was the power of being approved.  Foster’s view seemed to knock the bottom out of life, to deprive everything equally of charm and individuality.

The conversation turned on golf, and one of the guests, whom I am shortly about to describe, said bluffly that he considered golf and drink to be the two curses of the country.  Our polite friend turned courteously towards him, treated the remark as an excellent sally, and then said that he feared he must himself plead guilty to a great devotion to golf.  “You see all kinds of pleasant people,” he said, “in such a pleasant way; and then it tempts one into the open air; and it is such an excellent investment, in the way of exercise, for one’s age; a man can play a very decent game till he is sixty—­though, of course, it is no doubt a little overdone.”  We all felt that he was right; he took the rational, the sensible view; but it tempted me, though I successfully resisted the temptation, to express an exaggerated dislike of golf which I do not feel.