He realised that he had said nothing to Miss Bethel, and he turned to her. "You know London?" he said. He wondered whether she longed for it sometimes—its excitement and life.
"Oh yes," she said quickly; "we were there, you know, a long while ago, and I've been up once or twice since. But it makes one feel so dreadfully small, as if one simply didn't count, and no woman likes that."
"Pendragon makes one feel smaller," Harry said. "When one is of no account even in a small place, then one is small indeed."
He had not intended to speak bitterly, but she had caught the sound of it in his voice and she was suddenly sorry for him. She had been a little afraid of him before—even on that terrible afternoon at "The Flutes"; but now she saw that he was disappointed—he had expected something and it had failed him.
She said nothing then, and the meal came to an end. Bethel dragged Harry into his study to see the books. There was the same untidiness here. The table was littered with papers and pens, tobacco jars, numerous pipes, some photographs. From the floor to the ceiling were books—rows on rows—flung apparently into the shelves with no order or method.
"I'm no good as far as books go," said Harry, laughing. "There never was such a heathen. There have always been other things to do, and I must confess it is a mystery to me how men get time to read at all. If I do get time I'm generally done up, and a novel's the only thing I'm fit for."
"Ah, then, you don't know the book craze," Bethel Said. "It's worse than drink. I've seen it absolutely ruin a man. You can't stop—if you see a book you must get it, whether you really want it or no. You go on buying and buying and buying. You get far more than you can ever read. But you're a miser and you hate even lending them. You sit in your room and count the covers, and you're no fit company for man or beast."
Harry looked at him—"You've known it?"
"Oh yes! I've known it. I'm a bit better now—I'm out such a lot. But even now there's a great deal here that I've never read, and I add to it continually. The worst of it is," he said, laughing, "that we can't afford it. It's very hard on Mary and the wife, but I'm a rotten loafer, and that's the end of it."
He said it so gaily and with so little sense of responsibility that you couldn't possibly think that it weighed on him. But he looked such a boy, standing there with his hands in his pockets and that half-penitent, half-humorous look in his eyes, that you couldn't be angry. Harry laughed.