“My first also, and I’ve tarpon-fished for weeks.”
“We seem to bring one another luck.”
“It’s an undoubted fact, Elsie, we do.”
The deduction seemed to give rise to thoughts in each of them, and they let their eyes rove vaguely over the blue Gulf waters for the next few minutes without speaking, whilst the boat rode gently over the windless swells which slid in through the outlying keys. A porpoise surged past them, coughing as he chased a shoal of mullet; and, overhead, a string of purple and yellow cranes screamed wearily as they flapped home to the Everglades after a day’s hard fishing on a growing reef.
“They’ve all got to make their living,” said Onslow.
“Who?” asked the girl.
“I was thinking of those animals in the water and in the air, and, by analogy, the rest of the animal world. We all of us prey on something else, down to the ass who eats grass; or else we die.”
“That’s a very sage remark, Pat. Have you been reading Schopenhauer lately, or is your bank account unhealthy?”
Onslow laughed. “Was it pessimistic? I’m not given that way as a general thing. It’s so much pleasanter, for one’s self and everybody else, to look at matters from the cheerful point of view. But I was thinking at the time that if I’d been well off, and if other things had not happened as they did, my life would have been written very differently.”
“You mean you might have been her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Court of Timbuctoo?”