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Manisty disliked and had thrown aside the role of country gentleman; because, in truth, he had not money enough to play it magnificently, and he had set himself against marriage; because no woman had yet appeared to make the probable boredoms of it worth while.
Each meanwhile was conscious of a secret range of thoughts hers concerned with the effort and struggle, the bitter disappointments and disillusions of the past six weeks; and his with the schemes he had cherished in the East and on the way home, of marrying Mary Lyster, or more correctly, Mary Lyster's money, and so resigning himself to the inevitable boredoms of an English existence.
But outside all these lesser boredoms and anxieties there was another bigger than all the rest and growing every day: After the money was gone, what? It was a question that, in the past, he would have sheered away from as a horse shies from an obstacle intruding on a pleasant road. The spring of his youth was gone; the renewal of the old struggle too horrible to contemplate.
"Having, dear Sir, and my best gossip, supped alone to the injury of my custom, or, to speak more truly, supped in the company of all the boredoms of a cursed quartan fever, which will not let me taste the flavour of any food, I rose from table sated with the same disgust with which I had sat down to it.
It is impossible perhaps to be whirled in this fashion out of the whisperings and boredoms of town without longing to know a little more of the pretty magician who works this wonderful transformation scene. But it is no easy matter to know much of the buttercup.
But even this ugliness of faces, which of course were mostly familiar to him, seemed something new and uncanny, now that their features, instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identification of this or that man, who until then had represented merely so many pleasures to be sought after, boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged were at rest, measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their curves and angles.
For this reason the lives of the timid become a succession of boredoms and of pains. Even in those cases where no really unfortunate incident occurs, these people so exaggerate what actually does happen to them that the least little emotion causes them the most profound unhappiness.
In reality, however, he was not reflecting at all on the character and probable course of his life. It was all a matter of feeling and what concerned him was merely the comforts or discomforts, pleasures or pains, exhilarations or boredoms of the passing moment. The future was a word that, at the most, implied things that might happen a few days after tomorrow.
And after all the great things are sure to come! The power of seeing things straight and knowing what is beautiful or noble, quite undisturbed by momentary boredoms or changes of taste, is a very rare gift and never perhaps possessed in full by any one.
It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the words into her mouth. "Learning, I mean, so easily, that I am well." "Only, no one's of course well enough to stay in London now. He can't," Kate went on, "want this of you." "Mercy, no I'm to knock about. I'm to go to places." "But not beastly 'climates' Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms?" "No; just, as I say, where I prefer.
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