. . . What's more--and you'll see the
point of this by and by--he liked to keep his few friends in separate
cages. I won't say he was jealous: but if he liked A and B, it was
odds he'd be uneasy at A's liking B, or at any rate getting to like
him intimately.
This secretiveness had its value, to be sure. It gave you a sense of
being _privileged_ by his friendship. . . . Or, no; that's too
priggish for my meaning. Foe wasn't a bit of a prig. It was only
because he had, on his record already, so much brains that the
ordinary man who met him in my rooms was disposed to wonder how he
could be so good a fellow. Get into your minds, please, that he
_was_ a good fellow, and that no one doubted it; of the sort that
listens and doesn't speak out of his turn.
He had a great capacity for silence; and it's queer to me--since I've
thought over it--what a large share of our friendship consisted in
just sitting up into the small hours and smoking, and saying next to
nothing. _I_ talked, no doubt: Foe didn't.
I shall go on calling him Foe. He was Jack to me, always; but Foe
suits better with the story; and besides .
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