"So I thought, anyway, after I had persuaded Roger, that same night, to explain just a bit of what had been happening to him in the great world—where, it seemed, luck of sorts made such a mess of men. And indeed it was only a very little bit that he explained, for he was tired, and said that it was a long and dull history, even though it hadn't taken very long to happen. 'Exactly how long?' I asked, but he evaded that—else maybe I had known so very much more!
"'As you know, when a writer wants to be done with one of his characters,' he explained, 'he sometimes throws a few bad investments and bucket-shops at the poor man and he's done for before you turn the page. Well, there are plenty of such things outside books, and I somehow seem to have happened on one or three of late. And these debacles always happen in the same way, if they are going to happen at all, to men whose money is mostly on paper. The paper actually becomes paper—and now even a French gendarme wouldn't accept as a tip most of the stuff that was once my fortune. I thought I had tried every way there was of spending money, but I had never realised that losing it was the quickest. I know now. And that's all, Iris.'
"'But, my dear, it doesn't matter all that much! After all, bad-luck was never more than bad-luck seen in the Book of Job. It's inconvenient, of course—'
"'It's certainly that. But, of course, all your money is quite safe and doing very well, and I'll see any creditor to hell before you dare pay him one penny of any debt of mine. I'd have you know that the best bankrupts are always very touchy about the thoroughness of their bankruptcies.... But, as you say, Iris, all that doesn't matter very much.'
"If he agreed about that, then why was he getting himself ill over it? I was going to heckle him, when he explained—and with what so far unknown deference, in him, to one's bewilderment!—that he had not been worrying about losing the money, nor so very much about the now almost certain bankruptcy: 'Although that is really so serious for me that I've got to joke about it or be as entirely silent as I have been—and will be after to-night,' he excused his levity to warn me. 'But it's actually the naked fact that these things can and have happened to oneself that has got on my nerves—which must, I suppose, be very tender nerves. Just the change of luck, you see, rather than its particular results, however serious.' ...
"But before we went upstairs he took me by the shoulder with some of his old air of authority, and warned me that he would be very disappointed if I worried over what he had told me. 'Because, after all, I didn't tell you about it because I wanted to—but simply so that you shouldn't worry so much about my health now you know that it isn't due to a weak heart or a damaged lung—only damaged luck, after all! And I may, just possibly may, find a way out of everything in the next few weeks.'
"'With Cascan Oil?' I asked, as though it were a magic oil.
"But I didn't gather anything from his smile except that it was one of those smiles that never answer questions in the way you want them answered. 'It's certainly very good oil!' he only said.
"'And will you promise to tell me as soon as you have found your way out, as of course you will, you being you, luck or no luck?' I asked him firmly. 'And will you also promise to drop some of this air of resignation or whatever it is that has lately been growing on you? please, Roger, for although it makes you very kissable at home, I'm sure it's likely to make you quite "broke" in the great world—which doesn't care how much your wife loves you so long as it can get your money.'
"He promised to tell me—for I had fixed in my mind that as soon as he came to me with never so little brighter news I would at once snatch him away from London to some place like Tangiers, to mend his health and let the deuce take his luck, which was a plague, good or bad. And you know when he brought me news, at lunch-time two weeks later, the day before that....