Hubert laughed. "Dear old Kenneth!" and there was pity in his voice. "Perhaps I should, if I knew nothing of them really. But I'm afraid I know too much."
His counsellor made no reply. He always knew when he had failed. He also knew, from long experience, the only weapon that availed when once the hard line came round Brett's weak lips. He waited prudently, while they both smoked, and then he grasped it firmly.
"Well, it's a pity, Hubert," he said gaily, as though he had abandoned his attempt and could afford by now to laugh at it, "because you'd not only solve the sister problem but—look at the advertisement! 'Famous Author Weds.' 'Mr. Hubert Brett, the Novelist, who is to be married this week. Photo by Bassano.' 'Mr. Brett's beautiful young wife.' 'Mrs. Brett, wife of the celebrated author, opens a bazaar.'"
"Oh, shut up," cried Hubert quite youthfully, and made some pretence at throwing a tobacco-pouch, but did not seem displeased.
"Then," went on the remorseless friend, "she is at parties every day, and universally admired. Who is she? everybody naturally asks. Why, the wife of Hubert Brett. Have you read his new novel? If not, do."
"You must think me a conceited fool," Hubert put in, "if you imagine I swallow all that." Sometimes he suspected Boyd of sneering. Mrs. Boyd, he knew, disliked him. She had often tried a snub. She was a very brainless woman....
Kenneth Boyd dropped his manner of burlesque.
"All the same," he said, falling back into the old vein, "a wife does a lot in one's career, you know. She has so much more time for making friends. I always look on mine as my best canvasser! Why, man" (and now he shamelessly threw off the mask), "you simply don't know what you're missing. When I look back on my old single days, I hardly can believe that it was me or how I could have been such an almighty ass as to have wasted all those ghastly years. Perhaps, though, I shouldn't enjoy our life now so much, if I'd not had a good mouthful of the other. Good lord—the discomfort; the loneliness; the want of any one who really cares; the feeling that there's nothing permanent; the frantic writing round to make sure you won't have a lonely evening; the sick despair when some one fails and you sit moping by your fire or wander out among a crowd of laughing couples, damnably alone; the lack of any purpose in life; the constant cadging round for somebody to save you from a Soho restaurant. Good lord, it simply can't be true I had five years of it, and now...! Of course, Hubert, I know what you'll say. We're all different; you're not that sort; you never feel all this; you wouldn't feel as I do, if you married. But you do—you would. We're all utterly the same, deep down. You novelists forge little differences to help out your stories, but I tell you, deep down, men are all the same. We all get lonely, we all get sad and hopeless as the years go on, we want just one who values us more than the rest, who cares for our success, who smoothes away our failures. We can't, any one of us, get on alone. You're only shy, that's all. You funk proposing—you'd feel such a fool! But what's all that? There must be lots of jolly girls about. Just you fix on one, get married, and then come and settle down near us, out Hampstead way. Think of it! No climbing back into a grimy lodging—sorry, old man, but I mean the fogs. If you could just see Hampstead in a winter sunset! Then a nice little home, all new and clean; tea all put ready for you by your wife; the kiddies keen to see you; that's the one way, I tell you, for all men to come home. We're not different, a bit. We all want—you want—love and comradeship; we want another thing beside ourselves, in whose success we can feel proud; we want our wife, our children, and we want our home. And that's exactly what you want, my boy!"
Carried along midway, he suddenly became self-conscious and collapsed with the last sentence.
Hubert ironically clapped his hands. "Splendid, splendid! You ought to write advertisements; I'm sure the Garden City would pay a big premium. Title, 'The New Home!'"