‘Your eloquence must have been at fault. You have had perfect happiness, Gaston—there is the truth! You have had such a lot as does not fall to one man in a million, and you have grown careless of it.’
Geoffrey’s voice was set in a lower key than usual. Glancing round at him, Gaston surprised an expression on the strong features, a glow in the dark eyes that he remembered. Not wholly unlike this did Geff look on the late June evening when he came, four years ago, to his rooms in Jesus, and congratulated him, Gaston, on his engagement to Dinah Thurston.
‘You have always been Dinah’s friend. I thank God she will have you for her friend in the future. Towards myself, perhaps, you are a little less than kind. Some French proverb explains to us, does it not, how a man’s friendship can never be perfectly equal for a husband and for his wife?’
‘The French proverb is at fault, as far as I am concerned,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I am your friend. I am Dinah’s. At this present hour I reprobate the conduct of both with strict impartiality.’
‘My conduct is negative. I find myself placed by an outburst of the eternal feminine injustice in a ridiculous position. I must, as men have done before me, live a ridiculous position out. Whatever my wife desires in the way of money arrangements shall be hers. On the day when she is tired of Tavistock Moor I shall be at her feet.’
‘All this might be aptly said if you were in a stage-box, a critic looking on at the histrionic break-up of other people’s lives, with a view to the morning papers.’
‘I have tried, since I was a boy, to regard everything concerning myself from an indifferent person’s point of view. The habit has become second nature, and——’
‘Shake yourself free of it to-night. You are not an indifferent person. You are not criticising a scene in a mixed drama. You have to decide whether you, Gaston Arbuthnot, intend, at thirty, to be a failure or a success.’
‘A failure!’ repeated Gaston, his pride galled instantly. ‘In your office of peacemaker, Geff, don’t allow your good will to run away with you. We have a score of big examples—Byron, if you choose, at their head—to show how men of shipwrecked lives can give the world the best of their genius.’