7
Henry switched off the light and got into bed. He shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come to him. He lay blinking at the ceiling for a while, and then he got up and went into his sitting-room and got out his manuscript and began to write. He wrote steadily for half-an-hour, and then he put down his pen and read over what he had written.
"No," he said, crumpling the paper and throwing it into the wastepaper basket, "that won't do!"
He walked about the room for a few minutes, and then he went back to bed, and lay there with his hands clasped about his head.
"I don't see why I shouldn't get married myself," he said, and then he went to sleep.
THE SEVENTH CHAPTER
1
In the morning, Ninian and Roger rose early, for Ninian was going to Southampton to see the Gigantic start on her maiden voyage to America, and Roger had a case at a county court outside London. In a vague way, Ninian had intended to talk to Roger about his engagement, to reason with him, as he put it. Gilbert had pointed out that the chief employment of women is to disrupt the friendships of men. "Men," he had said to Ninian and Henry after Roger had gone to bed, "take years to make up a friendship, and then a female comes along and busts it up in a couple of weeks!" Ninian did not intend to let Miss Rachel Wynne break up their friendship, and he planned a long, comprehensive and settling conversation with Roger on the subject of females generally and of Rachel Wynne particularly. In bed, he had invented an extraordinarily convincing argument, before which Roger must collapse, but by the time he had finished shaving, the argument had vanished from his mind, and his convincing speech shrivelled into a halting, "I say, Roger, old chap, it's a bit thick, you know!" and even that ceased to exist when he saw Roger, with the Times propped against the sugar bowl, eating bacon and eggs as easily as if he had never betrothed himself to any woman.
"Hilloa, Roger!" said Ninian, sitting down at the table, and reaching for the toast.