Vanity was also in the impulse.

A vulgar newspaper prominence had been my final (and very genuine) tribulation; but to please and to interest one so pleasing and so interesting to me, was another and a subtler thing.

And then there was his sympathy--shall I add his admiration ?--for my reward.
I do not pretend that I argued thus deliberately in my heated and excited brain.

I merely hold that all these small reasons and motives were there, fused and exaggerated by the liquor which was there as well.
Nor can I say positively that Rattray put no leading questions; only that I remember none which had that sound; and that, once started, I am afraid I needed only too little encouragement to run on and on.
Well, I was set going before we got up from the table.

I continued in an armchair that my host dragged from a little book-lined room adjoining the hall.