The moment I had dropped the envelope through the brass lips of the box in the post-office, I burned with shame and had I not dreaded the curiosity of the postmaster, would have begged him to return it to me. The text of the letter now seemed at once flippant and turgid. I had been tricked into my pomposity by the corpulent silver inkwell as though its original owner had left his nineteenth-century clichés behind to mingle with the ink.

Dr. Galbraith was fitting the key to his post-box and as he withdrew a packet of mail and glanced through it, he was the object of the scrutiny of the postmaster who, leaning forward against his bars, remarked, “Well, Doc, I sure did fill your box this morning, but I guess it’s mostly ads and them journals.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” said the doctor in his pestered way. “Thank you. It’s a very interesting collection,” though he was shuffling the envelopes so rapidly that he could not possibly have told where they had come from.

“You been riding a horse, Doc?”

To the doctor’s fuscous cheeks arose a blush as he looked down at his clothes and then at the postmaster, who had not been in Chichester long.

“Uh, no, no, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.”

The doctor’s innumerable costumes were all spectacular and meticulously tailored, and they gave him the air of a “sporting gentleman” of a bygone era. One thought of his “cravats,” not of his neckties, and remembered their large, loose knots in the French style. He very often wore riding clothes as he did this morning, and it was said that he had once been an excellent horseman, just as it was said that he had once been an insatiable student of literature and had once “performed creditably” on the violin. Now, the only reminders of those talents were his dashing habits, his immense, unhandled library (presided over, I had heard, by busts of Dante, Pericles, Shakespeare, and Vergil under whose staring eyes he drank each night to a point of stupefaction), and the recollection of Mrs. Prather who had heard him play the solo of Dr. Joachim’s Hungarian Concerto.