He chuckled in irrepressible amusement.
"The other thing's no go!"
"No more it is. It needs—— No, I'm not going to be immoral any more. Go ahead! You're made for double harness, Walter. Choose her well! you'll have to learn her paces, you know."
"Or she mine?"
Blake was a little on his dignity again.
"Have another whisky and soda," said Caylesham, with admirable tact.
His advice, meant as precautionary, proved provocative. Memory worked with it—the carking memory of a failure of courage. Blake might blarney as he would about awakened conscience, but Caylesham had put his finger on the sore spot. Pleasure's potentiality of tragedy had asserted itself. It had been supremely disconcerting to discover and recognise its existence. Young Blake was for morality now—not so much because its eyes were turned upwards as for the blameless security of its embrace. He had suffered such a scare. He really wondered how Caylesham had managed to stand the strain of pleasing himself—with the sudden tragic potentialities of it. He paid unwilling homage to the qualities necessary for vice—for candid unmasquerading vice; he knew all about the other species.
Yet he was not hard on Sibylla. He recognised her temperament, her unhappy circumstances, and his own personal attractions. What he did not recognise was the impression of himself which that night in the Sailors' Rest would leave on her. He conceived an idea of his own magnanimity resting in her mind—yes, though such a notion could gain no comfortable footing in his.
Caylesham let him go without more advice—though he had half a mind to tell him not to marry a pretty woman.
"Oh, well, in his present mood he won't; and it would do him lots of good if he did," the impenitent, clear-sighted, good-humoured sinner reflected, with all the meaning which his experience could put into the words. He was of opinion that for certain people the only chance of salvation lay in suffering gross injustice. "If what a fellow brings on himself is injustice," he used to say. He always maintained that fellows brought it on themselves—an expiring gasp of conscience, perhaps.