“The mistake we make,” replied Griswold, “is in failing to seize opportunities when they offer. You and I have talked ourselves hoarse a thousand times planning schemes we never pull off. We are cursed with indecision, that’s the trouble with us. We never see the handwriting on the wall, or if we do, it’s just a streak of hieroglyphics, and we don’t know what it means until we read about it in the newspapers. But I thought you were satisfied with the thrills you got running as a reform candidate for alderman in New York last year. It was a large stage, and the lime-light struck you pretty often. Didn’t you get enough? No doubt they’d be glad to run you again.”
Ardmore glanced hastily about and laid his hand heavily on his friend’s shoulder.
“Don’t mention it—don’t think of it! No more politics in mine. The world may go hang if it waits for me to set it right. What I want is something different, a real adventure—something with spice in it. I have bought everything money can buy, and now I’m looking for something that can’t be tagged with a price.”
“There’s your yacht and the open sea,” suggested Griswold.
“Sick of it! Sick to death of it!”
“You’re difficult, old man, and mighty hard to please. Why don’t you turn explorer and go in for the North Pole?”
“Perfectly bully! I’ve thought of it a lot, but I want to be sure I’ve cleaned up everything else first. It’s always up there waiting—on ice, so to speak—but when it’s done once there will be nothing left. I want to save that for the last call.”
“You said about the same thing when we talked of Thibet that first evening we met at the University Club, and now the Grand Lama sings in all the phonographs, and for a penny you can see him in a kinetoscope, eating his luncheon. I remember very well that night. We were facing each other at a writing-table, and you looked up timidly from your letter and asked me whether there were two g’s in aggravate; and I answered that it depended on the meaning—one g for a mild case, two for a severe one—and you laughed, and we began talking. Then we found out how lonesome we both were, and you asked me to dinner, and then took me to that big house of yours up there in Fifth Avenue and showed me the pictures in your art gallery, and we found out that we needed each other.”
“Yes, I had needed you all right!” And Ardmore sniffed dolefully, and complained of the smoke that was drifting in upon them from the train sheds. “I wish you wouldn’t always be leaving me. You ought to give up your job and amuse me. You’re the only chap I know who doesn’t talk horse or automobile or yacht, or who doesn’t want to spend whole evenings discussing champagne vintages; but you’re too good a man to be wasted on a college professorship. Better let me endow an institution that will make you president—there might be something in that.”
“It would make me too prominent, so that when we really make up our minds to go in for adventures I should be embarrassed by my high position. As a mere lecturer on ‘The Libelling of Sunken Ships’ in a law school, I’m the most obscure person in the world. And for another thing, we couldn’t risk the scandal of tainted money. It would be nasty to have your great-grandfather’s whisky deals with the Mohawk Indians chanted in a college yell.”