He laughed aloud.
“And so I am the coming parti! Good Lord! I’ll be fine practice for the ‘sport,’ anyway they’ll find me shy game. I’ll go home, finish a chapter or two, dose Tolly, and then I’ll dine.
“Hullo!” he exclaimed suddenly, “things are looking up for Charlie, he can go to Paris now when he likes. I wonder how I can reduce his high stomach to seeing it in that light!”
CHAPTER XIX.
Strange found the preliminaries of his induction into the rôle of an English Squire even more unpleasant than he had expected.
During the period when he had read Roman law and knocked about the Courts with the hope of supplementing his income by the experience he picked up there, the technicalities of the law had bored him to excruciation point. Now, when they were brought specially to bear on him he found them more galling still, but being a wise man in his way, he shirked none of them, and took good care not to take a solitary step in the dark, till, by the time they had got him off their hands, the solicitors of the Stranges were in a position to congratulate themselves at last, on the fact of having found a whole man in the family.
He had gone the rounds of his duties doggedly and had found them insufferably dull, he had been down to Strange Hall, had left things there in trim, and had now flown back to London.
One afternoon in June he was standing in the shadow of a deep window, in one of his rooms in Piccadilly, lazily sharpening a pencil.
He had plenty of work to do, but somehow he had no stomach for it, the change in his life had got into his bones, and had filled him with unrest and a certain loss of faith in himself. When at last after a long meditation, the truth of this broke upon him, it came with an audible and ample, “Damn!”
“I may as well give it up and amuse myself in a mild way,” he thought, after a hasty review of matters, “nothing can be too weak and vapid for my present condition—I feel flabby.”