He had cried about Smoky; lying in the dark of the ward. It was the first time he had cried about anyone.
Well, he might be too slow to break horses any more, but he would be no servant to oil. There were other ways of living with horseflesh.
The dude ranch. That had not been like the films either.
Ungainly women in unseemly clothes punishing the saddles of broken-spirited horses until he wondered that they didn't break in two.
The woman who had wanted to marry him.
She had been not at all the kind of woman you'd imagine would want a "kept man." Not fat or silly or amorous. She was thin, and tired-looking, and rather nice; and she had owned the place up the hill from the dude ranch. She would get his leg put right for him, she said. That was the bait she had offered.
The one good thing about the dude ranch was that you made money at it. He had never had so much money in his life as when he finished there. He planned to go East and spend it. And then something had happened to him. The smaller, greener country in the East, the smell of spring gardens, woke in him a nostalgia for England that dismayed him. He had no intention of going back to England for years yet.
For several restless weeks he fought the longing-it was a baby thing to want to go back-and then quite suddenly gave in. After all, he had never seen London. Going to see London was quite a legitimate reason for going to England.
And so to the back room in Pimlico and that meeting in the street.