“What an odd idea! Why a nunnery?”
“Oh, because it’s an extreme of one sort or another, and you are made for extremes. You’ll perhaps be very wicked first”—he smiled delightfully—“after which, of course, you’d have to be very good. It’s the way you’re made. I’m cut out on quite a different plan. I can’t be ‘very’ anything, unless it’s very drunk after the Oxford and Cambridge at Lord’s.”
“Do you think I could be very wicked?” She asked the question with a thoughtfulness that amused him greatly, and he answered at once:
“I haven’t a doubt of it. You are probably plotting the particular form of wickedness at this very moment.”
She laughed, and he went on in the same serio-comic mood:
“I quite envy you. It must be very thrilling to think to oneself, ‘I’ve dared to be desperately wicked.’ You cease to be a nonentity at once and become a force. You get right to hand-grips with the big elemental things. Of course that is interesting, but it usually means a confounded lot of bother.”
“You are as bad as Hal Pritchard. She announced the other day she would rather have a dishonest purpose than no purpose at all.”
“It’s the same idea, only Miss Pritchard lives up to her creed by being full of energy and purpose; whereas I can’t be anything but a mediocre waster. I’ve neither the pluck to be wicked, not the energy to be good, nor enough purpose to regret it. I believe I’m best described as an aristocratic ‘stiff’, a ‘stiff’ being a person who spends his life trying to avoid having to do things.
“I fill a niche all the same,” he finished, “because I make such an excellent foil for the other chaps, who like to pride themselves on their superiority and hard work. It’s nice for them to be able to say contemptuously, ‘Look at Denton,’ and it’s nice for me to be able to feel I’m of some use, without the bother of making an effort.”
“You are certainly quite incorrigible as an idler, if that can be called a purpose, and, Flip, don’t change; I love you for it; you are one of the most restful things I have ever known.”