Archie Merridew and I were only half contemporaries. He was younger than I by a good seven years--was, as a matter of fact, only twenty-three when he died. And in nearly everything else we were as sharply contrasted as we were in our fortunes. Indeed, we were much more so, for while I miserably coveted that thirty-eight pound upper floor of his near the Foundling Hospital, my faith in myself and my ambition would have helped me over that. Physically, we were as different as we could be. My almost gigantic size made me, in my cramped red and green lighted apartment, an enormously overgrown squirrel in the smallest of cages; but to Archie's rather dandified little dapperness his series of roof chambers was spacious as a palace. Mentally we diverged even more. I was taciturn, he lively as one of the crickets that used to chirp behind his little Queen Anne teapot of a fireplace. And as for luck--well, if luck ever so much as nodded to me in those days, it seemed to change its mind and to pass by on the other side, while he seemed to pull things off the more easily the more recklessly he blundered.
And he had his people at Guildford, while I had never a soul in the world.
I don't know how we contrived to hit it off as well as, on the whole, we did. Perhaps that too was part of his lucky disposition--he could get along even with me. He always spread some sort of a weak charm about him, and this charm always disarmed me even, when to all intents and purposes he was merely rubbing in my horrible poverty. He would tell me, as if I wasn't already eating my heart out about it, that it was about time I made an effort--that _he_ wasn't going to remain in those stuffy diggings of his all _his_ days--and that if he had only half my brains he'd be up somewhere pretty high in a very short time (as he probably would had he lived)--all this, you understand, for my good, the cigarette gummed to his prettily shaped upper lip wagging as he talked, and with the best intentions in the world. He was quite devoted to me; would tell me how he had told other people about those extraordinary brains of mine; and he never dreamed (though it was not long before I began to) that our respective ages were even then making of our companionship a hopeless thing. A lad of seventeen may attach himself for a time to a man whose years number twenty-four of bitterness and exclusion, but they will part company again before the one is twenty-three and the other thirty.