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"If you stick to whist and quinze," said Charles, solemnly, giving me the advice they were forever thrusting upon him, "and play with system, you may make as much as four thousand a year, sir." And this was how I was treated by those heathen and cynical macaronies, Mr. Fox's friends. I may not say the same for the whole of Brooks's Club, tho' I never darkened its doors afterwards.
He turns his back forever upon those dreadful shrubberies and flees as from the wrath to come. "But how with a gang? Their number would have inspired them with confidence; if, indeed confidence is ever wanting in the breast of the arrant blackguard; and of arrant blackguards alone are the supposed gangs ever constituted.
But I'm afraid you'll get the dyspepsy eatin' so late; why, it's nigh on to ten o'clock; and I was just a-thinking' about shutting' up and going off to bed." "Well, you'll not be troubled with me long. I shall leave the place in a few days." "Leave Lansdale, do you mean?" "Yes." "Why, what's up?" "The time I had appropriated to rest and recreation. Business men can't play forever."
But he had been evil, and had had no conscience or moral mentor from the beginning; so he had never known anything real in his life. He thought he had known Christine, but now he saw her in a new light, through the eyes of her sister from whose heart he had gathered a harvest of passion and affection, and had burnt the stubble and seared the soil forever.
He asked the usual questions, rings were exchanged, words pronounced which bound them forever, and then he delivered an address to the newly married couple. The sound of stifled sobs caused several to turn their heads. Mme. Walter was weeping, her face buried in her hands.
"Come and see me when you can," she sent back word, "but I know you won't have much chance when you're experimenting with your invention. And I shall be working so hard for the Red Cross that I sha'n't get much chance to entertain you. But the war can't last forever." "No," agreed Tom with a sigh, as he put away her letter, "and thank goodness that it can't!"
This gave me the most terrible shock of all. It was plain that my doom was fixed forever. For if it was certainly foreknown, it must he unchangeably fixed. These dreadful doctrines filled me with horror. They all but drove me mad. For a time, when I was about eight or nine years old, they did drive me mad. They were more than my nature could bear.
Perhaps you would have had to sit there opposite her, knowing what I did and feeling as I did, to understand why. She was kind, she was compassionate I could see she didn't want to make it hard for me. Perhaps she even wanted to make it easy. But there, between us, was the memory of the gesture I hadn't made, forever parodying the one I was attempting!
Yet not at the price of twice this suffering if she could suffer more would she blot out from her soul the experience life had given her. Maybe, she thought, the blow that shattered her love-story and her happiness was a punishment for weakness in longing for the world. Yet if it were a punishment she was ready to kiss the rod, since she might hold forever the memory of Vanno and his love.
It is to lose sight of the fact that unless the life finds itself now it never will find itself, that to dwarf a soul to-day is to dwarf it forever. "Then," says the practical man, "this means that we can ignore the future; we must make the most of the present; get all you can; keep all you get; the whole purpose of life is to make a good living, to enjoy yourself."
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