‘Oh yes, it does.’ She nodded her head, round-eyed, like a child. Then she laughed. ‘For that matter,’ she cried, ‘I shouldn’t have thought it of you either. I never met anybody so full of beans. Why, even when you’re saying how miserable you are, you seem to be enjoying yourself a lot more than most people are when they think they’re really happy for once. Look at Sir Bill there. He wouldn’t admit he wasn’t ever enjoying himself, but at the top of his form, with a pint or two of champagne tucked away inside him, he’s a damn sight more miserable than you are when you talk as if you were nearly dead. So there, Mister Roger.’
‘Ah, but’—and he shook his head—‘to-night’s different. That’s what I’m really trying to tell you?
‘I’d risk every night being different, with you. Not that you aren’t fed up, of course. It didn’t take me long to see that. And then that story of yours. That got over all right with me, I can tell you. But you’ve no need to sit about, thinking it out over and over again or doping yourself. You’re not really that sort. I know. You’re full of fight and fun. I’m a bit like that myself but not so much as you are, and that’s why I like you or partly why. Only I’m not clever like you and that makes it easier for me?
‘I’m just not quite so clever as a ten-year-old retriever,’ he protested. ‘And that’s not modesty either. I don’t even want to be clever. I’ve met some of the clever ones, and they make me sick?
She stirred and then moved a little closer to him. ‘Why don’t you do something?’
‘What’s this?’ he exclaimed softly. ‘Good advice?’
‘Sounds like it, doesn’t it? I expect you’re thinking it’s damned cheek, coming from me.’
‘No, I’m not. It couldn’t come from a better person; I wouldn’t have it from anybody else, I believe. But what do you mean exactly?’
Before she replied, she slid a hand up the cushion and then rested her cheek against it. He found something curiously moving in that little action, seen vaguely in the gloom of their little covered place. It was one of those things that women carry over from childhood. And now she was beginning to explain herself in that funny little voice of hers, which had been hastily shedding acquired accents and becoming more piquant all the time they had been talking together.
‘What I mean is this,’ she began. ‘Have a pop at something. Start something fresh. Take a chance again. But try something you haven’t tried before. You can call it good advice if you like, and it is for your own good I’m telling you; but I don’t mean you ought to go to night-school or keep hens or put five shillings a week in the Post Office Savings Bank. You can work the confidence trick or run a roulette board, if it comes to a pinch—though I can’t see you doing anything like that—but the thing is, do something. If you think everything’s all wrong—about the war and all that—you could at least take a soapbox round and spout at street corners, like the Bolshies or socialists or whatever they are. Anyhow, do something, and then you won’t know yourself.’