"And then," said Mr. Spenlove after a pause, "I discovered that Captain Macedoine belonged to that class of raconteurs who do not believe in reticence on personal matters. I have very little of that sort of squeamishness myself, but he was much more confidential. If confidential is the word. Because there was no atmosphere of confession about his story. He frequently interjected the words, 'you know,' and it really seemed as if he assumed that we did know, and was just amusing himself. Or perhaps he was rehearsing for the day of judgment. No matter. He ran on. And we listened. We were interrupted once, when an elderly person, 'My housekeepah,' as he called her, 'Madame Petronita,' came in with some sustaining liquid in a basin. And if you ask me what he talked about, I should say that he furnished us with a large number of details of his private life which the majority of us never mention even though we may not be ashamed of them. At this distance of time it presents to me the sort of memory which one retains of an interesting book read long ago. I remember him, you see, because of what happened afterward, because he was the father of this girl of whom I am telling you, and I recall the picture of him dispensing those amiable garrulities because it was as we sat there that the notion first came to me that he was really an original artist working upon himself and concealing himself behind the grandiose presentment of an impossibly superior and effulgent human being. All I had known of him or heard of him in the old days corroborated this notion of mine. 'We are a very old family, you know--I was a younger son, you know--I was at Charterhouse School, you know--we were very poor--a scholarship boy, you know.' This was addressed to a certain extent to me, as an Englishman, of course, but the glamour of his rich intonation enveloped those two beautiful women, mother and daughter, sitting there with their perfect parted lips and their extraordinarily seductive Slavonic eyes. It would be interesting, no doubt, to know just what they imagined lay in the portentous statement that Captain Macedoine had been sent as a poor boy--a day boy, he informed us meticulously--to that ancient foundation known as the Charterhouse--they with their oriental antecedents, their untrammelled comprehension of the romantic value of life, and their initiation into western ways in a Brooklyn apartment. Yet I'm not sure that deep did not call into deep, that they did not succeed in getting hold of his real meaning after all. As Mrs. Sarafov said to me afterward in the intense darkness of the street, 'Captain Macedoine, he goes 'way back, I guess'; and there was a peculiar inflection in her tone which brought to mind echoing corridors in the house of life.