"What's wrong with it?"
"It is not the same as it was, Charlie. The old crowd has all gone away or gone to bits—Webb is in the Colony; Jack Lowther is mostly engaged (I think) in praying that his wife won't be too much for him when she comes out—she is on the water! The Dales are away. Bill Godley is up Inyanga way. McLeod's finances are in bits, and he's too busy keeping a stiff lip to be sociable. Clewer is now Public Prosecutor and has become a saint. Little Oppy has gone home. Solomon says he has met the Queen of Sheba at last, and expects that to account for his never being in evidence anywhere except in the stage box of the Standard Theatre."
"Oh, damn it! disgusting!" commented Bramham.
"And, anyway, the Rand air always chips the edges off my nerves, Bram. It's too high. Lord knows, I don't feel any too fit now! I believe I have another go of fever coming on."
Bramham looked at him critically and affectionately. "You do get some doses, but I hope you're not in for another, Karri!" he said. "By Jove! When South African fever puts her loving arms round a man she clings as only fever and a woman can."
Bramham's face was clouded, but there was no real bite in his words. He had no quarrel with the clinging arms of women, or of fever. But he blamed these things for the look of bitter discontent and cynicism that lay across the beauty of the fine face beside him. Carson wore in his eyes the look, and round the mouth the marks, of one who has "wearied of every temple he has built"; or, as Bramham's thought expressed itself with no great originality, yet not without point—the look of a man who has got to the core of his apple and finds it rotten.
"It's that look," Bramham told himself, "that gives women an instinct to comfort him; while if they had only let him alone from the first, maybe it wouldn't be there at all! And you can't comfort a man for his soul's bitterness, as though he has the stomach-ache. Besides which, Karri takes to comfort badly; he'd rather get a smack in the teeth any day from someone he can hit back!"
Thus Bramham, musing and staring at the sea. In spite of its marred beauty, Carson's face seemed to him finer than that of any man he had ever known—and he knew most men of any consequence in South Africa. Meanwhile Carson, giving him another glance, wondered what kept him quiet.
"Thinking of some woman, I suppose!"
Presently Bramham did turn his mind to his own affairs.