“Is it not?” I rejoined with a laugh. “Are we not all too full of commercial common sense now-a-days?”
“Even for an isolated case here and there, you think?”
“I have not heard of one. Perhaps your experience, Count, is more interesting than mine.”
He gave a shrug. “I have seen curious things in my time.”
“I can well believe you,” was my mental comment.
“And,” he continued in a tone of polite, but, to me, somewhat repulsive banter, “my imagination could easily construct of you, my young friend, a wandering knight seeking adventures.”
“At least, it is on my own account,” I laughed.
“Ah, yes. The motive now-a-days is less illogical than formerly, if quite as unprofitable. You, now, might be earning a name for yourself at home in one of the professions, but you prefer to wander about in out-of-the-way corners of Europe for what? For the pleasures of a roving life and the excitement of not knowing when you wake what the day may bring forth.”
“It is preferable, at least, to the humdrum holiday of the ordinary tourist.”
“Holiday!” He looked incredulous. “Scarcely a holiday in the sense in which most men understand the term. You are tied, I presume, by no limit of time or means; is it not rather the business of your life now to rove where you will, answerable to no one, cut off from all ties, your very family in total ignorance of your whereabouts?”