“Quite right!” said Dicky.
“Then you agree with me?—you approve?” asked Christian, not concealing his surprise.
“Of course I do. It’s awful rot,” the other affirmed. He observed his host silently for a space, and meanwhile, by a quite visible process, the familiar external elasticity, not to say flippancy, of his manner seemed to fall away from him. “With me, of course,” he went on, almost gravely, “I have to do it. I must get my secretaryship, or I can’t live. My relations could put me into the swim, but they can’t support me there indefinitely. I have only two aunts, you know—dear old things, they are—and they keep me going, but they have only life interests, and I fancy they have to scrape a little as it is.
“So you see,” pursued Dicky Westland, “I must help myself, and it’s only by knowing the right people, and being seen at the right places, that a fellow can bring anything off. For example, now: Lady Winsey is a distant cousin of mine, and she’s promised the aunts, you know, and there’s an old Sir Hogface Something-or-Other dodging about the place, who’s going to get a West Indian governorship in May, and Lady Winsey has not only had him at her house to dinner, where he could see me, but has contrived to throw me at him at three other houses. Next week I’m to go down to a closing meet in Berkshire, just because he’s to be there—and that she arranged, too. And it’s all to get a place worth perhaps three hundred a year, with yellow fever thrown in—if it comes to anything at all.”
“Three hundred a year,” commented Christian, knitting his brows. “I still make pounds into francs to know what a sum means,” he explained, smilingly, after a moment. “Once I would have thought that a great fortune—and only a few months ago, too, at that.”
“Well, you see how it is,” said Dicky. “I mustn’t let any chance slip by. But if I stood in your shoes, dear God! how I would chuck it all!”
“But what would you do instead?” Christian propounded this question sitting back in his chair, with the tips of his fingers joined, and a calm twinkle in his eye. He discovered himself feeling as if it were his companion who had made confessions and craved sympathy.
Dicky looked into his hat, and pouted his lips in whimsical indecision. “What I mean is,” he explained at last—“my point was this—I hate the whole thing, and if I didn’t have to do it, why then I wouldn’t do it, d’ye see? I’d go about with nobody except the people I really cared about—my right-down, intimate friends. That’s the idea.”
“Ah—friends!” said Christian. “That is the word that sings in my ears!”
He rose impulsively, and began walking about the room with a restless step. Now and again he halted briefly to look down upon his companion, to enforce with eyes as well as gesture some special thing in his talk. “Yes, friends!” he cried. “Tell me, you Dicky Westland, where are friends to be found? Have you some, perhaps? Then where did you come upon them? It is what I should like very much to know. Listen to me! I have been in England six months. I possess in England, say two—three—no, five friends—and all these came to me in my first week here. All but one belong to my family, so they were here, ready-made for me. But since that time, now that I am for myself, I have not gained one friend. Is there then something strange—what do I say—forbidding in me? Or no—it is nonsense for me to say that. It is the other way about. I have seen nobody who awakened voices within me. There has been no one who appealed to me as a friend should appeal. I live among a thousand rich and fine people who are as good to me as they know how to be—and yet I am as if I lived in a desert. And it is very cold—and lonely—and heartbreaking in this desert of mine!”