Fortunately at that moment the waiter was handing me a dish.
To the best of my belief I had never seen the fellow before.
I asked myself whether his bow was due to my insistent stare, which made him think that he had met me somewhere, or whether I had really run across him and completely forgotten.
I have a bad memory for faces and I had in this case the excuse that he looked exactly like a great many other people.
You saw a dozen of him at every golf course round London on a fine Sunday.
He finished his dinner before me.
He got up, but on his way out stopped at my table.
He stretched out his hand.
'How d'you do?' he said. 'I didn't recognize you when you first came in.
I wasn't meaning to cut you.'
He spoke in a pleasant voice with the tones cultivated at Oxford and copied by many who have never been there.
It was evident that he knew me and evident too that he had no notion that I did not also know him.
I had risen and since he was a good deal taller than I he looked down on me.
He held himself with a sort of languor.
He stooped a little, which added to the impression he gave me of having about him an air that was vaguely apologetic.
His manner was a trifle condescending and at the same time a trifle shy.
'Won't you come and have your coffee with me?' he said. 'I'm quite alone.'
'Yes, I shall be glad to.'
He left me and I still had no notion who he was or where I had met him.
I had noticed one curious thing about him.
Not once during the few sentences we exchanged, when we shook hands, or when with a nod he left me, did even the suspicion of a smile cross his face.
Seeing him more closely I observed that he was in his way good-looking; his features were regular, his grey eyes were handsome, he had a slim figure; but it was a way that I found uninteresting.
A silly woman would say he looked romantic.
He reminded you of one of the knights of Burne-Jones though he was on a larger scale and there was no suggestion that he suffered from the chronic colitis that afflicted those unfortunate creatures.
He was the sort of man whom you expected to look wonderful in fancy dress till you saw him in it and then you found that he looked absurd.
Presently I finished my dinner and went into the lounge.
He was sitting in a large arm-chair and when he saw me he called a waiter.
I sat down.
The waiter came up and he ordered coffee and liqueurs.
He spoke Italian very well.
I was wondering by what means I could find out who he was without offending him.
People are always a little disconcerted when you do not recognize them, they are so important to themselves, it is a shock to discover of what small importance they are to others.
The excellence of his Italian recalled him to me.
I remembered who he was and remembered at the same time that I did not like him.
His name was Humphrey Carruthers.
He was in the Foreign Office and he had a position of some importance.
He was in charge of I know not what department.
He had been attached to various embassies and I supposed that a sojourn in Rome accounted for his idiomatic Italian.
It was stupid of me not to have seen at once that he was connected with the diplomatic service.
He had all the marks of the profession.
He had the supercilious courtesy that is so well calculated to put up the backs of the general public and the aloofness due to the consciousness the diplomat has that he is not as other men are, joined with the shyness occasioned by his uneasy feeling that other men do not quite realize it.
I had known Carruthers for a good many years, but had met him infrequently, at luncheon-parties where I said no more than how do you do to him and at the opera where he gave me a cool nod.
He was generally thought intelligent; he was certainly cultured.
He could talk of all the right things.
It was inexcusable of me not to have remembered him, for he had lately acquired a very considerable reputation as a writer of short stories.
They had appeared first in one or other of those magazines that are founded now and then by well-disposed persons to give the intelligent reader something worthy of his attention and that die when their proprietors have lost as much money as they want to; and in their discreet and handsomely printed pages had excited as much attention as an exiguous circulation permitted.
Then they were published in book form.
They created a sensation.
I have seldom read such unanimous praise in the weekly papers.
Most of them gave the book a column and the Literary Supplement of The Times reviewed it not among the common ruck of novels but in a place by itself cheek by jowl with the memoirs of a distinguished statesman.