‘Just because our fathers and grandfathers would have those potted prawns you spoke of.’
‘No, no; you are all wrong. It’s the new race—it’s the new generation. They don’t bear reverses. Whenever the world goes wrong with them, they talk as they feel, they lose appetite, and they fall down in a state like your—a—Walpole—like your own!’
‘Well, my lord, I don’t think I could be called captious for saying that the world has not gone over well with me.’
‘Ah—hum. You mean—no matter—I suppose the luckiest hand is not all trumps! The thing is to score the trick—that’s the point, Walpole, to score the trick!’
‘Up to this, I have not been so fortunate.’
‘Well, who knows what’s coming! I have just asked the Foreign Office people to give you Guatemala; not a bad thing, as times go.’
‘Why, my lord, it’s banishment and barbarism together. The pay is miserable! It is far away, and it is not Pall Mall or the Rue Rivoli.’
‘No, not that. There is twelve hundred for salary, and something for a house, and something more for a secretary that you don’t keep, and an office that you need not have. In fact, it makes more than two thousand; and for a single man in a place where he cannot be extravagant, it will suffice.’
‘Yes, my lord; but I was presumptuous enough to imagine a condition in which I should not be a single man, and I speculated on the possibility that another might venture to share even poverty as my companion.’
‘A woman wouldn’t go there—at least, she ought not. It’s all bush life, or something like it. Why should a woman bear that? or a man ask her to do so?’