‘I don’t expect they think of him,’ said my host.

He pulled a pouch and a packet of cigarette papers from his pocket.

‘Have one of mine,’ I suggested, hastily producing my case.

He did not even glance at its contents.

‘No, thanks,’ he said curtly.

I named my brand.

‘My dear sir,’ he said, with a return to his kindly exasperation, ‘no cigarette that is not fresh made can be called a cigarette.’  I stood corrected.  ’You may pay as much as you like, but you can never buy cigarettes as good as I can make out of an ounce of fresh B.D.V. tobacco.  Can you roll one?’ I had to admit that I could not, I who in Bloomsbury was accepted as an authority on cigarettes as well as on porcelain.  ’I’ll roll you one, and you shall try it.’

He did so.

I gathered from his solemnity that cigarettes counted in the life of Mr Brindley.  He could not take cigarettes other than seriously.  The worst of it was that he was quite right.  The cigarette which he constructed for me out of his wretched B.D.V. tobacco was adorable, and I have made my own cigarettes ever since.  You will find B.D.V. tobacco all over the haunts frequented by us of the Museum now-a-days, solely owing to the expertise of Mr Brindley.  A terribly capable and positive man!  He knew, and he knew that he knew.

He said nothing further as to Simon Fuge.  Apparently he had forgotten the decease.

‘Do you often see the Gazette?’ I asked, perhaps in the hope of attracting him back to Fuge.

‘No,’ he said; ‘the musical criticism is too rotten.’

Involuntarily I bridled.  It was startling, and it was not agreeable, to have one’s favourite organ so abruptly condemned by a provincial architect in knickerbockers and a cap, in the midst of all that industrial ugliness.  What could the Five Towns know about art?  Yet here was this fellow condemning the Gazette on artistic grounds.  I offered no defence, because he was right—­ again.  But I did not like it.

‘Do you ever see the Manchester Guardian?’ he questioned, carrying the war into my camp.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Pity!’ he ejaculated.

‘I’ve often heard that it’s a very good paper,’ I said politely.

‘It isn’t a very good paper,’ he laid me low.  ’It’s the best paper in the world.  Try it for a month—­it gets to Euston at half-past eight—­and then tell me what you think.’

I saw that I must pull myself together.  I had glided into the Five Towns in a mood of gentle, wise condescension.  I saw that it would be as well, for my own honour and safety, to put on another mood as quickly as possible, otherwise I might be left for dead on the field.  Certainly the fellow was provincial, curt, even brutal in his despisal of diplomacy.  Certainly he exaggerated the importance of cigarettes in the great secular scheme of evolution.  But he was a man; he was a very tonic dose.  I thought it would be safer to assume that he knew everything, and that the British Museum knew very little.  Yet at the British Museum he had been quite different, quite deferential and rather timid.  Still, I liked him.  I liked his eyes.