All the same I want you to
understand that he wasn't a pot-hunter. I don't quite know how to
explain. . . . His father had died while he was at Rugby, leaving him
a competence; but he certainly was not over-burdened with money.
Of that I am sure. . . . Can't say why. He never talked of his
private affairs, even with me, though we were friends, "Jack" and
"Roddy" to each other still, and inhabited lodgings together in Jesus
Lane. He owed money to no one. Unsociable habit, I used to call it;
destructive of confidence between man and man.
But he was no pot-hunter. I think--I am sure--that so long as he
kept upsides with money he rather despised it. He had a handsome
face--rather curiously like the pictures you see of Dante--and his
mind answered to it, up to a point. Fastidious is the word, . . .
gave you the impression he had attached himself to Natural Science
much as an old Florentine attached himself to theology or anatomy or
classics, with a kind of cold passion.
The queerest thing about him was that anything like "intellectual
society," as they call it, bored him stiff.
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