"Yes, perhaps it would be better," Guy agreed. "But then of course there is the question of leaving Pauline for two years."
Yet even as he enunciated this so solemnly, he knew in his heart that he would be rather glad to postpone for two years all the vexations of love.
His father shrugged his shoulders.
"My poems are coming out this Autumn," Guy volunteered.
His father gave some answer of conventional approbation, and Guy without the least bitterness recognized that to his father the offer of the secretaryship had naturally presented itself as the more important occasion.
"If you want any help with your outfit...."
"Oh, you mustn't count on Persia," interrupted Guy. "But I'll go up to town to-morrow and ask Comeragh when Sir George is going."
Next day, however, when Guy was in the train, he began to consider his Persian plan a grave disloyalty to Pauline. He wondered how last night he had come to think of it again and fancied it might have been merely an instinct to gratify his father after their coolness. Of course he would not dream of going really, and yet it would have been jolly. Yes, it would certainly have been jolly, and he was rather relieved to find that Comeragh was out of town for a week, for his presence might have been a temptation. Michael Fane was not in London either, so Guy went round to Maurice Avery's studio in Grosvenor Road and in the pleasure of the company he found there the Persian idea grew less insistent. Maurice himself had just been invited to write a series of articles on the English ballet for a critical weekly journal called The Point of View. They went to a theatre together, and Guy as he listened to Maurice's jargon felt for a while quite rustic and was once or twice definitely taken in by it. Had he really been stagnating all this time at Wychford? And then the old superiority which at Oxford he always felt over his friend reasserted itself.
"You're still skating, Maurice," he drawled. "The superficial area of your brain must be unparalleled."
"You frowsty old yokel!" his friend exclaimed laughing.