Autumn had passed into winter. The yellowest and most obstinate of the leaves had been torn from their moorings by the October gales, and fluttered down on to the damp pavement, like tears shaken from the wrath-bearing tree. Charles sat in front of the electric fire in the living-room of his flat and looked across the carpet at Mr. Blearney.

‘And a very nice place too, partner,’ Mr. Blearney was rasping appreciatively. ‘Just the very thing. Well, well, your luck changed just in time, didn’t it?’

‘I fell on my feet all right,’ Charles admitted.

‘Fell on your feet!’ Mr. Blearney echoed, comically shocked. ‘Can’t you find anything better to say about it all than that?’

Charles had been smoking one of his guest’s cheroots, and now crushed out the stub in an ashtray and began meditatively unrolling it.

‘Well, I suppose I ought to be overjoyed,’ he said, ‘and yet I can’t quite feel that it’s anything but a freak of chance, and one doesn’t like owing one’s way of life to a freak of chance.’

Mr. Blearney exploded with laughter.

‘That’s rich. I say that’s rich. Here you are, only just in the game, and you start talking like all the rest of them.’

‘All the rest of whom?’

‘It’s typical, you see,’ Mr. Blearney explained seriously. ‘That’s what you are, typical. The entertainment world is full of people who think they only got themselves mixed up in it by accident—what you’d call a freak of chance. Every department of the business, it’s the same. Fight promoters who think they’re country vicars at heart, conjurors who meant to be dentists. Look at me,’ he said, violently wrenching his rubbery features into an expression of self-pity, ‘a poor old leg-show organizer whose Dad wanted him to be a market gardener!’

‘Why? Was he one himself?’

‘You bet your life he was. And in a very good way of business. “No need to get your finger-nails dirty, Arthur,” he used to say, “not like I had to. Just the office part of it for you, my lad. A gentleman, that’s you.” But I couldn’t see eye to eye with the old man. I kicked over the traces, and I’ve lived my life in the enter­tainment business one way and another.’

Charles unrolled the last fragment of leaf. ‘Well, I can’t help it if I sound typical,’ he said. ‘I suppose I did turn down a steady, humdrum life, like you, but it wasn’t a question of breaking out or kicking over any traces. I never rebelled against ordinary life: it just never admitted me, that’s all. I never even got into it.’

‘Same thing,’ said Mr. Blearney authoritatively. ‘You never wanted to get into it because it hadn’t got what you wanted.’