If these real facts were to be
got from any one, they were to be got from Skelmersdale himself;
and I set myself, therefore, still more assiduously to efface
the first bad impression I had made and win his confidence to the pitch
of voluntary speech. In that endeavour I had a social advantage.
Being a person of affability and no apparent employment, and wearing
tweeds and knickerbockers, I was naturally classed as an artist
in Bignor, and in the remarkable code of social precedence prevalent
in Bignor an artist ranks considerably higher than a grocer's assistant.
Skelmersdale, like too many of his class, is something of a snob;
he had told me to "shut it," only under sudden, excessive provocation,
and with, I am certain, a subsequent repentance; he was, I knew,
quite glad to be seen walking about the village with me. In due course,
he accepted the proposal of a pipe and whisky in my rooms readily
enough, and there, scenting by some happy instinct that there
was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing that confidences beget
confidences, I plied him with much of interest and suggestion from
my real and fictitious past. And it was after the third whisky
of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly, that a propos
of some artless expansion of a little affair that had touched and
left me in my teens, that he did at last, of his own free will
and motion, break the ice.
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