“Ah, and were you there in summer, Frank?”
“Of course not, Prescott. One might as well live in an oven, with an air blowing in from a fever-den.”
“Quite so, Frank. You see other places have their detestable points as well as ours.”
Frank Maynard gave a grunt of discontent, and again looked out of the window. At last he turned round again.
“What on earth am I to do with myself, Prescott?”
“My dear Frank, I am afraid that question is likely to bring on a long discussion; but in consideration of the day, and the more especially as I see you do not mean to let me read, I will put away my books for the afternoon.”
“There’s a good fellow,” Frank said, brightening up greatly, and wheeling the fellow arm-chair of the one he had been sitting in, up to the fire, while Prescott put his books back into their places on the shelves. That done, he opened a bottle of beer, poured it into a large tankard—a college trophy of his prowess in boating—and lit his pipe.
“There, that’s comfortable,” Frank said. “The climate has its advantages after all. Now let us talk seriously. What in the world am I to do? Here have I been back in England little more than three months, two of which I have spent shooting, and now after a month in London, I am bored out of my life.”
“It is a hard case, Frank; a man with eight hundred a year, and nothing to do but to spend it; and you are out nearly every evening, too.”
“That’s all well enough for the evening, Prescott, but I can’t spend the day thinking whom I am going to meet in the evening; and whether the pretty girl I danced with the night before will be there, and so on.”