re. The particular weekly that you want is not
taken in; the dinner is execrable, and the ventilation a farce. All
these evils oppressed me to-night. And yet I was puzzled to find that
somewhere within me there was a faint lightening of the spirits;
causeless, as far as I could discover. It could not be Davies's
letter. Yachting in the Baltic at the end of September! The very idea
made one shudder. Cowes, with a pleasant party and hotels handy, was
all very well. An August cruise on a steam yacht in French waters or
the Highlands was all very well; but what kind of a yacht was this?
It must be of a certain size to have got so far, but I thought I
remembered enough of Davies's means to know that he had no money to
waste on luxuries. That brought me to the man himself. I had known
him at Oxford--not as one of my immediate set; but we were a sociable
college, and I had seen a good deal of him, liking him for his
physical energy combined with a certain simplicity and modesty,
though, indeed, he had nothing to be conceited about; liked him, in
fact, in the way that at that receptive period one likes many men
whom one never keeps up with later. We had both gone down in the same
year--three years ago now. I had gone to France and Germany for two
years to learn the languages; he had failed for the Indian Civil, and
then had gone into a solicitor's office. I had only seen him since at
rare intervals, though I admitted to myself that for his part he had
clung loyally to what ties of friendship there were between us. But
the truth was that we had drifted apart from the nature of things. I
had passed brilliantly into my profession, and on the few occasions I
had met him since I made my triumphant _debut_ in society I had found
nothing left in common between us. He seemed to know none of my
friends, he dressed indifferently, and I thought him dull. I had
always connected him with boats and the sea, but never with yachting,
in the sense that I understood it. In college days he had nearly
persuaded me into sharing a squalid week in some open boat he had
picked up, and was going to sail among some dreary mud-flats
somewhere on the east coast. There was nothing else, and the funereal
function of dinner drifted on. But I found myself remembering at the
_entree_ that I had recently heard, at second or third hand, of
something else about him--exactly what I could not recall. When I
reached the savoury, I had concluded, so far as I had centr