For an instant, he felt that he was not glad to see the person who came in. It was a young man of about his age, tall and fair, and handsome in a buoyant, bright-faced way of his own. His blue eyes sparkled cheerfully into Christian’s doubtful glance, and he held out a hand as he advanced. Everybody in the world called him Dicky Westland, and for this opening moment Christian thought of him as preeminently typical of all the vanities and artificialities he was on the point of forswearing.
“Not seedy, I hope?” the new-comer said in comment upon the other’s loose attire—and perhaps upon his dubious countenance as well. His voice had a musical vivacity in it which seemed to lighten the room. Christian, as he took the hand and shook his head, smiled a little. It began to occur to him that really he did like this young man.
“No,” he replied, with a gesture toward a chair. “I’m all right. Only the whim seized me—to come home and read a book. I got homesick, I think.”
This statement, once in the air, seemed funny to the young men, and Dicky Westland laughed aloud. Christian, sitting down opposite his visitor, felt himself sharing his animation. ‘“It was good of you to come,” he declared, with a refreshed tone. “The truth is, I’m tired out. I am up too late. I run about too much.”
“Yes, a fellow does get hipped,” assented Dicky. “But you are so tremendously regular, it doesn’t do you any harm. A days’ rest now and then, and you’re right as a trivet again.”
“Regular,” Christian repeated, musingly. He formed his lips to utter some reflection upon the theme, and then closed them again. “Will you have a cup of tea?” he asked, with the air of thinking of something else.
The other shook his head, and preserved a posture of vivacious anticipation, as if Christian had made a literal promise to unburden his mind. The suggestion was so complete that Christian accepted it as a mandate.
“I am glad you came,” he said, “because—well, because I have come to a conclusion in my mind, and I should like to put it into words for you—so that I can also hear it myself. I am resolved to go away—to leave London.”
Dicky lifted his brows in puzzled interrogation. “How do you mean?” he asked.
“I do not like it,” Christian replied, speaking more readily now, and enforcing his words with eager hands. Lingfield had cautioned him against this gesticulatory tendency, but the very consciousness that he was in rebellion brought his hands upward into the conversation. “It is not what I care for. I come into it too late, no doubt, to understand—appreciate it, properly. The people I meet—I have no feeling for them. It seems a waste of my time to sit with them, to stand and talk, to go about from one of their houses to another. At the end of it all, there is nothing. They have all thick shells on, and they are not going to let me get inside of them. And, moreover, if I did get inside, who can be sure there would be anything of value there? It does not often look so to me, from the outside. But it is a waste of time and labor, and it does not amuse me in the least, and why should I pursue it?”