It was a historic moment in his life, and, unlike most men at such
partings of the ways, he was fully conscious of it. Nevertheless, he
passed straight from it to another performance hardly less
extraordinary. From his table drawer he produced a little memorandum
book, and in it--just below a diagram of a new chest-developing exercise
invented last night by Klinker--he jotted down the things that Fifi said
a man must do to be like other men.
A clean half-hour remained before he must go and call on the young lady
with the tom-boy name, Charles Weyland, who knew "what the public
liked." He spent it, he, the indefatigable minute-shaver, sitting with
the head that no longer ached clamped in his hand. It had been the most
disturbing day of his life, but he was not thinking of that exactly. He
was thinking what a mistake it had been to leave New York. There he had
had but two friends with no possibility of getting any more. Here--it
was impossible to blink the fact any longer--he already had two, with at
least two more determinedly closing in on him. He had Fifi and he had
Buck--yes, Buck; the young lady Charles Weyland had offered him her
friendship this very day; and unless he looked alive he would wake up
some morning to find that Nicolovius also had captured him as a friend.
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