"There is a place laid for him," she uttered in the tone of one whose patience is a sternly acquired virtue. And she left us.
"Better strip, my lad," chuckled Dibdin, "and put on your wrestling trunks."
"What d'you mean?" I demanded sulkily.
"The tussle that life is going to give you will be a caution."
"A lot you know about life!"
"Not much, that's a fact," Dibdin observed more soberly. "But I've had to face some things, Randolph. I've had to grin at a lot of greasy Arabs in the desert who thought they would hold me for ransom. I've had to laugh out of their dull ambition a pack of villainous Chinese thugs in Gobi, who felt it would profit them to cut my throat. I've had to make my way alone through a jungle in Central America for days when the beastly natives absconded with the supplies and left me in the middle of a job of excavation. I've had other little episodes. But never, son, I may say truthfully, have I shown such blue funk as you did just then before the patient Griselda."
"Rot!" was my only answer. "Let's go in to dinner."
It is after ten. Old Dibdin is gone and I have been putting down these foolish notes.
It must be by some odd law of balance or compensation, I suppose, that those whose lives are least important keep the fullest record of them. It is a weakness of mine to wish to read in the future the things I failed to do in the past. It is really for you, O Randolph Byrd, aged seventy, that I am writing these notes.
If only Gertrude had made up her masterful mind to three months hence, instead of three weeks, I should have taken my last fling and gone by the next boat to Italy.