He knocked his pipe out on the grate before he answered, but when the words came, they burst forth like an explosion.
"You married men," he cried, turning the attack, "are just like parrots. You can only say one thing. You're worse than parrots: you're gramophones—or parrots with a gramophone inside. You're always saying one thing, 'Marry!' and you say it jolly long. I honestly believe you've got a Trades Union, unless it's merely nasty feeling! That probably is it. You hate to see others as happy as you used to be!"
Whereat, comforted, he stretched his long legs and lay back on the deep chair in a better humour.
"No," said the other gently. "We hate to see them miserable and know they'll never realise man's one chance of happiness till it's too late."
He spoke in very earnest tones and looked almost anxiously across at his friend, now quite happy again with the flushed sensation of having achieved something at any rate not too far from an epigram. A peaceful smile played round the big mouth which alone betrayed weakness in his pale, clear-cut face.
How young he was in some ways, Kenneth Boyd reflected—in self-complacency, for one! And yet, in others, how much too settled and fixed for his years. Here he was, a ten-year resident of these rooms—comfortable enough, yes—looked after by a sister; turning out his yearly novel, no worse but no better than the one before; an old bachelor at thirty-five, and yet too young to speak of marriage as anything except a rather tasteless joke!
He watched him anxiously, as he might watch his patients at the hospital, and wondered whether he was beyond helping.
Hubert Brett said nothing. He was angry.
Why, he was wondering, had he telephoned for Boyd to come along at all? He always had asked Boyd, of course, even in the dear old Oxford days, when he was in a difficulty. Boyd's great forehead, thick chin, and deep voice gave him a sort of solid, comfortable air: and he was never sympathetic.... Probably his medical work—it was not nice, quite, to think of it like that—made him a restful person to consult? He always smoothed you down and made you feel that what you meant to do would be entirely for the best.
But he had been off form to-night....