“What did you pay me five francs for? For the pleasure of hearing me talk, or for the value of my counsel?”
“I must look at things practically,” said Martin.
“But, good God!” cried Fortinbras, with soft uplifted hands, “what is there more practical, more commonplace, less romantic in the world than riding a bicycle? You want to emerge from your Slough of Despond, don’t you?”
“Of course,” said Martin.
“Then I say—get on a bicycle and ride out of it. Practical to the point of pathos.”
Martin objected: “No one will pay me for careering through France on a bicycle. I’ve got to live, and for the matter of fact, so has Corinna.”
“But, my dear young friend, she has twenty pounds. You, on your own showing have forty. Sixty pounds between you. A fortune! You both are tormented by the idea of what will happen when the Pactolus runs dry. Banish that pestilential miasma from your minds. Go on the adventure.”
In poetic terms he set forth the delights of that admirable vagabondage. His eloquence sent a thrill through Martin’s veins, causing his blood to tingle. Before him new horizons broadened. He felt the necessity of the immediate securing of an engagement grow less insistent. If he got home with twenty pounds in his pocket, even fifteen, at a pinch ten, he could manage to subsist until he found work. And perhaps this blandly authoritative, though seedy angel really saw into the future. The temptation fascinated him. He glanced again at Corinna, who sat demure and silent, her chin propped on her fists, and his heart sank. The proposition was absurd. How could he ride abroad, for an indefinite number of days and nights with a young unmarried woman? Of himself he had no fear. Undesirous cat though he was, sent forth on the journey into the world to learn desire, he could not but remain a gentleman. In his charge she would enjoy a sister’s sanctity. But she would never consent. She could not. No matter how profound her belief in his chivalry, her maiden modesty would revolt. Her reputation would be gone. One whisper in Wendlebury of such gipsying and scandal with bared scissor-points would arrest her on the station platform. And while these thoughts agitated his mind, and Corinna kept her eyes always demure and somewhat ironical on Fortinbras, the latter continued to talk.
“I’m not advising you,” said he, “to pedal away like little Pilgrims into the Unknown. I propose for you an objective. In the little town of Brantôme in the Dordogne, made illustrious by one of the quaintest of French writers——”
“The Abbé Brantôme of ‘La Vie des Dames Galantes’?” asked Corinna.