Kendricks looked at his friend through the cloud of tobacco smoke.
"It's excitement of rather a dangerous order," he remarked slowly.
"I shall never be likely to forget that I am an Englishman," Julien said. "Perhaps I may be able to do something to set matters right again. One can't tell. By the bye, Kendricks," he went on, "do you remember when we were at college how you hated women? How you used to try and trace half the things that went wrong in life to their influence?"
The journalist nodded. He knocked the ashes from his pipe deliberately.
"I was a boy in those days," he declared. "I am a man now, getting on toward middle age, and on that one subject I am as rabid as ever. I hate their meddling in men's affairs, shoving themselves into politics, always whispering in a man's ear under pretence of helping him with their sympathy. They're in evidence wherever you go—women, women, women! The place reeks with them. You can't go about your work, hour by hour or day by day, without having them on every side of you. It's like a poison, this trail of them over every piece of serious work we attempt, over every place we find our way into. They bang the typewriters in our offices, they elbow us in the streets, they smile at us from the next table at our workaday luncheon, they crowd the tubes and the cars and the cabs in the streets. Why the deuce, Julien, can't we treat them like those sage Orientals, and dump them all in one place where they belong till we've finished our work?"
Julien lifted his tumbler of whiskey and soda to his lips and set it down empty.
"In a way, you're right, Kendricks," he agreed. "You go too far, of course, but I do believe that women hold too big a place in our lives. I am one of the poor fools who goes to the wall to gratify the vanity of one of them."
The journalist muttered a word under his breath which he would have been very sorry to have seen in the pages of his paper. Julien had moved to the open window. There had been a little break in his voice. No one knew better than Kendricks that a very brilliant career was broken.
"I think you're wise to go away for a time, Julien," he decided. "Look here, it's six o'clock now. I have a taxicab waiting downstairs. Come round to my rotten little restaurant in Soho and dine with me. Your fellow can meet us at Charing-Cross with your things. You won't see a soul you know where I'm going to take you."
Julien turned slowly away from the window. He was looking for the last time from those rooms at the London which he had loved. The setting sun had caught the dome of St. Paul's, was flashing from the dark, placid water of the Thames. The roar of the great city was passing from eastwards to westwards.