‘I advise it,’ he said positively. ‘I advise it. You have already wasted the best years.’
‘The best?’
‘One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You have nothing to learn about love!’
He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.
The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing critically at his chandeliers.
‘Does love bring happiness?’ I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring his remark.
‘For forty years,’ he quavered, ‘I made love to every pretty woman I met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent. return on my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I certainly did not get even that in happiness. I got it in—other ways.’
‘And if you had to begin afresh?’
He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.
‘I would do the same again,’ he whispered.