"You're lucky," Jimmy said abruptly, as they came down the steps of the mansions into the street.
Kelly looked up with a grin. "Do you mean in having our cook?"
Jimmy disregarded the question, and went on, "Were you lonely when you first came home, before you married? Did you have to go through it, or had you people of your own?"
He did not put it clearly, but the other showed he understood when he answered, "My people are all in the North, and they're Nonconformists and teetotallers. I went up once, and the governor and I quarrelled. I haven't seen them since. Dora's never seen them. We were married six months after I came home, on nothing. I wouldn't have risked it, but she insisted for my sake. I was at the old game, you know."
Jimmy nodded. He understood, remembering vividly certain wild drinking bouts which, incidentally, had given him some practical experience in newspaper work, for on more than one occasion he had taken Kelly's place, and brought out the little sheet.
They walked on a little way in silence, then, "Women are a confounded sight better than we are," Kelly jerked out. "They see so much further. We reckon we are being unselfish when we're only cowards; but they're ready to back their own opinion and run the risk; and when they win they let us take the credit."
"Some of them do, the right sort. But there are others——" Jimmy was thinking of the girls to whom Ethel Grimmer had introduced him, those whose parents had trained them in a due appreciation of the value of men of position.
Kelly stopped suddenly and looked at him anxiously. "James Grierson," he said, "I shall put you in a book some day when you're developed. At present you're about twenty-one years old in many respects. Probably you'll marry stodgily, or else you'll go to the other extreme and make an even bigger ass of yourself."
Jimmy flushed uncomfortably, remembering Lalage; then went hot at the thought of his own folly. He had only spoken to the girl once.