 visit to this house. A few days ago he would, in spite of
himself, have been somewhat awed by the man-servant at the door, the furniture
of the hall, the air of refinement in the room he entered. At present he smiled
on everything. Could he not command the same as soon as he chose?
    Mr. Westlake rose from his writing-table and greeted his visitor with a
hearty grip of the hand. He was a man pleasant to look upon; his face, full of
intellect, shone with the light of good-will, and the easy carelessness of his
attire prepared one for the genial sincerity which marked his way of speaking.
He wore a velvet jacket, a grey waistcoat buttoning up to the throat, grey
trousers, fur-bordered slippers; his collar was very deep, and instead of the
ordinary shirt-cuffs, his wrists were enclosed in frills. Long-haired,
full-bearded, he had the forehead of an idealist and eyes whose natural
expression was an indulgent smile.
    A man of letters, he had struggled from obscure poverty to success and ample
means; at three-and-thirty he was still hard pressed to make both ends meet, but
the ten subsequent years had built for him this pleasant home and banished his
long familiar anxieties to the land of nightmare. »It came just in time,« he was
in the habit of saying to those who had his confidence. »I was at the point
where a man begins to turn sour, and I should have soured in earnest.« The
process had been most effectually arrested. People were occasionally found to
say that his books had a tang of acerbity; possibly this was the safety-valve at
work, a hint of what might have come had the old hunger-demons kept up their
goading. In the man himself you discovered an extreme simplicity of feeling, a
frank tenderness, a noble indignation. For one who knew him it was not difficult
to understand that he should have taken up extreme social views, still less that
he should act upon his convictions. All his writing foretold such a possibility,
though on the other hand it exhibited devotion to forms of culture which do not
as a rule predispose to democratic agitation. The explanation was perhaps too
simple to be readily hit upon; the man was himself so supremely happy that with
his disposition the thought of tyrannous injustice grew intolerable to him. Some
incidents happened to set his wrath blazing, and henceforth, in spite of not a
little popular ridicule and much shaking of the head among his friends,
