"Know! I should think I did. I'm up to my watch-guard myself--think I'll take a sherry peg, just to keep myself up. This is a dull world, sir; a very wearying orb. Gad, sometimes I think my cousin, poor Jack Hamilton, was right, after all."
"What did he say?" asked Caterham, not caring a bit, but for the sake of keeping up the conversation.
"Say! well, not much; he wasn't a talker, poor Jack; but what he did say was to the purpose. He was a very lazy kind of bird, and frightfully easily bored; so one day he got up, and then he wrote a letter saying that he'd lived for thirty years, and that the trouble of dressing himself every morning and undressing himself every night was so infernal that le couldn't stand it any longer; and then he blew his brains out."
"Ah," said Lord Caterham; "he got tired of himself, you see; and when you once do that, there's nobody you get so tired of."
"I daresay, dear old boy, though it's a terrific notion. Can't say I'm tired of myself quite yet, though there are times when I have a very low opinion of myself, and think seriously of cutting myself the next time we meet. What's the news with you, my dear Caterham?"
"News! what should be the news with me, Algy? Shut up in this place, like a rat in a cage, scarcely seeing any one but the doctor."
"Couldn't see a better fellow for news, my dear old boy. Doctors were always the fellows for news,--and barbers!--Figaro hé and Figaro la, and all that infernal rubbish that people laugh at when Ronconi sings it, always makes me deuced melancholy, by Jove. Well, since you've no news for me, let me think what I heard at the Club. Deuced nice club we've got now; best we've ever had since that dear old Velvet Cushion was done up."
"What's it called?"
"The Pelham; nothing to do with the Newcastle people or any thing of that sort; called after some fellow who wrote a book about swells; or was the hero of a book about swells, or something. Deuced nice place, snug and cosy; a little overdone with Aldershot, perhaps, and, to a critical mind, there might be a thought too much Plunger; but I can stand the animal tolerably well."
"I know it; at least Ive heard of it," said Caterham. "They play very high, don't they?"