“Good-bye!” I said, alighting and grasping her hand; then as the commissionaire swung the club door open her companion raised his hat and the carriage was driven rapidly away.
Chapter Eight.
Secret Understanding.
Idle memory shortens life, or shortens the sense of life, by linking the immediate past clingingly to the present. In this may be found one of the reasons for the length of time in our juvenile days and the brevity of the time that succeeds. The child forgets, habitually, gayly, and constantly. Would that I had never acquired the habit of recall!
Jack, in a well-worn velvet lounge coat, was seated at his writing-table absorbed in his work when I entered, a couple of hours after I had left Mabel. His small den, lined with books, contained but little furniture beyond the big oak writing-table in the window, a heavy old-fashioned horse-hair couch, and several easy-chairs. Littered with newspapers, books, magazines, and those minor worries of an author’s life, press-cuttings, the apartment was nevertheless snug, the bright fire and the green-shaded reading-lamp giving it a cosy appearance.
“Halloa, old chap!” he cried, throwing down his pen gayly and rising to grip my hand. “So glad you’ve looked in. Have a weed?” and as we seated ourselves before the fire he pushed the box towards me.
“I met Mabel to-day,” I said at last, after we had been chatting and smoking for some minutes.
“Did you? Well? What’s the latest fad? Teas for poor children, bicycling, golf, old silver, or what?”