"Which," Wertheimer continued, standing, "is why we arranged to give him that billet with the British Legation in Peking."
"Didn't know you had a hand in that," observed Duchemin, after favouring the other with a morose stare.
"Oh, you can't trust me! When you get to know me better you'll find I'm always like that--forever flitting hither and yon, bestowing benefits and boons on the ungrateful, like any other giddy Providence."
"But one is not ungrateful," Duchemin insisted. "God knows I would gladly have sped Karslake's emigration with Sonia to Van Dieman's Land or Patagonia or where you will, if it promised to keep him out of the way long enough for the Smolny Institute to forget him."
"Since the said Smolny inconsiderately persists in failing to collapse, as per the daily predictions of the hopeful."
"Just so."
"But aren't you forgetting you yourself have given that Smolny lot the same and quite as much reason for holding your name anathema?"
"Ah!" Duchemin growled--"as for me, I can take care of myself, thank you. My trouble is, I want somebody else to take care of. I had a daughter once, for a few weeks, long enough to make me strangely fond of the responsibilities of a father; and then Karslake took her away, leaving me nothing to do with my life but twiddle futile thumbs and contemplate the approach of middle age." "Middle age? Why flatter yourself? With a daughter married, too!"
"Sonia's only eighteen..."
"She was born when you were twenty. That makes you nearly forty, and that's next door to second childhood, Man!" the Englishman declared solemnly--"you're superannuated."