Watson smiled mildly. "Very different, indeed. I'm not sure I would have been quite capable of the sort of athletics I've discovered you enjoy, not then, even if I'd thought you might like them." Good lord, but he had been ill, then. Ill, and broken, and without any notion of the sort of fellow he had thrown his lot in with.

He gave a sudden laugh as a thought occurred to him. "Imagine it, if I had been free to say it. 'I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. And also I am occassionally inclined to fucking men, although you needn't worry about my attentions if you're not similarly inclined.' Do you think that's what it's like, to share lodgings in the future?"