"How do you know?"
"Because I did a little in that line myself this afternoon. Let me tell you something; there isn't a profession in all the world which can be so easily and quickly acquired as yours. Therefore pin no more orders and ribbons and stars and medals on yourself. The only difference between you and your public is that they have no time to practice your profession in addition to their own."
Which took him down a peg or two, until we both took down another peg or two. But when I called the waiter and ordered a third, he became more cheerful.
"You're a jollier," he said, "aren't you?"
"I did a little this afternoon. Go on about Kingsbury and Smithy. After all, Williams, you really do it much better than I."
Which mollified him amazingly, and he began with a brisk confidence in his powers of narration:
When Kingsbury had finished his course at the University of Paris, there appeared to be little or nothing further in the way of human knowledge for him to acquire. However, on the chance of disinterring a fragment or two of amorphous information which he might find use for in his projected book, The Economy of Marriage, he allowed himself another year of travel, taking the precaution to invite Smith—the flippancy of Smith being calculated to neutralise any over-intellectual activity in himself.
He needed a rest; he had had the world on his hands too long—ever since his twentieth year. Smith was the man to give him mental repose. There was no use attempting to discuss social economy with Smith, or of interesting that trivial and inert mind in race suicide. Smith was flippant. Often and often Kingsbury thought: "How can he have passed through The University of Paris and remained flippant?" But neither Sorbonne nor Pantheon produced marked effect upon Smith, and although it is true that Paris horridly appealed to him, in the remainder of Europe he found nothing better to do than to unpack his trout-rod and make for the nearest puddle wherever they found themselves, whether in the Alps, the Tyrol, the Vosges, or the forests of Belgium, where they at present occupied a stucco-covered villa with servants, stables, hot-houses, and a likely trout stream for Smith to dabble in, at a sum per month so ridiculously reasonable that I shall not mention it for fear of depopulating my native land.
Besides, they had the youthful and widowed Countess of Semois for their neighbour.