"I wouldn't interfere with your convictions for the world, and, as I'm a bachelor, I don't mind them." He was looking at Blake rather keenly now, wondering what made the young man take the subject so much to heart. "But if I were you I'd keep them in the theoretical stage, I think."
He laughed again, and turned to light a cigar. Blake was smoking too, one cigarette after another, quickly and nervously. Caylesham looked down on him with a good-humoured smile. He liked young Blake in a half-contemptuous fashion, and would have been sorry to see him make a fool of himself out and out.
"I'm not going to ask you any questions," he said, "though I may have an idea about you in my head. But I'm pretty nearly twenty years older than you, I fancy, and I've knocked about a good bit, and I'll tell you one or two plain truths. When you talk like that, you assume that these things last. Well, in nine cases out of ten, they don't. I don't say that's nice, or amiable, or elevated, or anything else. I didn't make human nature, and I don't particularly admire it. But there it is—in nine cases out of ten, you know. And if you think you know a case that's the tenth——"
This was exactly what Blake was sure he did know.
"Yes, what then?" he asked defiantly.
"Well," answered Caylesham slowly, "you be jolly sure first before you act on that impression. You be jolly well sure first—that's all." He paused and laughed. "That's not moral advice, or I wouldn't set up to give it. But it's a prudential consideration."
"And if you are sure?"
"Sure for both, I mean, you know."
"Yes, sure for both."
"Well, then you're in such a bad way that you'd better pack up and go to the Himalayas or somewhere like that without an hour's delay, because nothing else'll save you, you know."