“Well now, can it? I put it to you. Just run over all the ‘happy couples’ within the circle of your acquaintance: to how many of them is life a summer idyll, or any sort of idyll at all? You needn’t go further than this house, which at present contains a good few ‘yoke-fellows,’ to use a thoroughly expressive term. If you haven’t yet found time to observe them, just keep your eyes open for the next day or two—if you can divert those killing orbs from the adorable Alma, that is—and a place like this is good for observations of the kind, because the subjects of them are always more or less off their guard. Putting it at the lowest computation, eight marriages out of every ten are abject failures—the other two very dubious.”
“Oh, indeed! And how many are there that turn out satisfactorily?” said Phil, ironically.
“Perhaps one in five thousand.”
“Oh—well—it’s something to have got you to admit that much. Now why shouldn’t I, for instance, hit off that one?”
“Why shouldn’t you? Well now, Phil, I put it to you as one not wholly unacquainted with sporting matters. What would you say to a fellow who should ask you to take tickets in a lottery where the chances were five thousand to one against you—or rather to take one ticket, and that at the price of all you were worth? You’d vote him drunk, of course. Yet if I know anything of my fellow-creatures, you are in a fair way towards perpetrating that identical suicidal imbecility. Now, what do you say? Chuck your expedition across the lake to-morrow, and let’s go on to Zermatt now instead of a week or so later. That, or your fate is sealed.”
“No you don’t, old chap; no you don’t,” said Phil, who, far from being offended by the other’s ill-conditionedness, was hugely pleased thereat, since it confirmed and encouraged certain hopes he had already more than half shaped. “By Jove, I never had such a good time in my life as I’ve been having here. Too soon to cut it just yet.”
Fordham’s shoulders went up in an expressive shrug as he turned away to the door.
“Don’t say you weren’t shown the cliff you proposed to jump over,” he said. “Jump now, and be—blessed to you.”
“By the way, Fordham,” said Phil, “isn’t it a deuced rum thing? The old General knows my governor well—or rather did, years ago.”
“Did he?” was the sharp reply, as the speaker faced suddenly round. “Ah well—yes—it is queer. But the world’s a pretty small one. There goes the second bell,” he added, in his normally unconcerned tones, as he again turned to the door.