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admit.”
    His next remark astonished me. Sniffing the air as though it were a sample to be tested, he added in a soft voice, “Of course you’re presented with a unique advantage.”
    “What?”
    “You need furnish no biography for yourself. And if you think that’s not a benefit for certain occupations …” He let the comment die in a silence he created, and asked no questions.
    Yet there were incidents, trivial enough, upon which he placed curious emphasis. At night he was often out of his room, and apparently concerned that I should not be curious about his absence, he would go out of his way to present the reason. “There was a particular party I had to see last night,” he might say. “Feminine.” The corner of his mouth curling with mockery,he would go into his solitary laughter while I waited with an uncomfortable smile, not knowing at what it was directed.
    He interested me a great deal. I was certain he was relatively uneducated, yet his intelligence was acute, and from passing references, it was apparent he had read and absorbed a surprising number of books. I had a theory McLeod had begun his serious studies—it was difficult to think of him reading for pleasure—comparatively late, and had spent his time with major works. The collection in his bookcase indicated little personal taste. I said something about this once and he answered glumly, “Taste, m’boy, is a luxury. I don’t have enough money to dance around with this and that. Nor the time either.” It was obvious, I deduced, that he must set aside perhaps a dollar a week, gleaned from petty sacrifices, and when he had saved enough he would buy the particular book he wanted at the moment. Such denial would cost him something, but he gave little evidence how it might pinch, cocking his sneer at the world and seeming oblivious of any other existence beyond the stale cabbage smell of our dark and dusty rooming house.
    In everything he did there were elements of such order, demanding, monastic. He was unyielding and sometimes forbidding. Dressed in the anonymous clothing of a man who buys his garments as cheaply as possible, there were nonetheless two creases always to be found in a vertical parallel upon his buttocks. The straight black hair was always combed, he never needed a shave. And his room, clean as any cell could have been in our aged mansion, described an unending campaign against the ceiling which sweated water and the floor which collected dust.
    I made a number of assumptions about McLeod. At the department store his salary was small, and I wondered why he should have been content with so little when he was intelligent and probably efficient. I ended with an hypothesis developed from what I knew of his room, his clothing, and the way hebought his books. Everything about him, I decided, was timid. His horizon bounded no doubt by the image of a house in some monotonous suburb, he would sell the birthright he had never enjoyed for regular work and security. “Bury the rest,” I could hear him say, “I’m only a poor noodle in search of a sinecure.”
    It is true that in many of our conversations he worried ceaselessly at a political bone, but I showed little interest. He spoke in a parody of Dinsmore’s words, saying almost the same things but with an odd emphasis that made it difficult to know if he were serious or not. Once I told him, “You sound like a hack,” and McLeod reacted with a rueful frown. “An exceptional expression for you to employ, Lovett,” he told me softly. “I take it you mean by ‘hack’ a representative of the people’s state across the sea, but I’m wondering where you picked up the word, for it indicates a reasonable amount of political experience on your part.”
    I laughed and said somewhat heavily, “Out of all the futilities with which man attempts to express himself, I find politics among the most pathetic.”
    “Pathetic, is it?” he had said, and directed at me a searching stare.