“I didn’t mean you to go yourself,” said Bob.
“Oh! I see. I’m to fit out the expedition and you are to go in command. I don’t quite see where the fun would come in for me. It wouldn’t excite me any to hear of your shooting Esquimaux and penguins. I shouldn’t care enough whether you lived or were froze to get any excitement out of a show of that kind.”
“We’d call it ‘The Joseph P. Conroy Expedition,’” said Bob; “and the newspapers—”
“Thanks. But I’m pretty well fed up with newspaper tosh. The press has boosted me ever since I landed in this country, and I’d just as soon they stopped now as started fresh.”
Bob relinquished the idea of a Polar expedition with a sigh.
It was Conroy himself who made the next suggestion.
“If politics weren’t such a rotten game—”
Bob did not feel attracted to political life; but he was loyal to his patron.
“Clithering,” he said, “was talking to me to-night. You know the man I mean, Sir Samuel Clithering. He’s not in the Cabinet, but he’s what I’d call a pretty intimate hanger on; does odd jobs for the Prime Minister. He said the interest of political life was absorbing.”
“I shouldn’t care for it,” said Conroy. “After all, what would it be worth to me? There’s nothing for me to gain, and I don’t see how I could lose anything. It would be like playing bridge for counters. They might make me a lord, of course. A title is about the only thing I haven’t got, but then I don’t want it.”