"If ever the game becomes too tiresome here, why, the next steamer will
take me out of it! What a _gorgeous_ time we had on that glacier!"

He stood looking at a splendid photograph of a glacier in the Thibetan
Himalayas, where, in the year following his mother's death, he had spent
four months with an exploring party. The plate had caught the very grain
and glisten of the snow, the very sheen and tint of the ice. He could
_feel_ the azure of the sky, the breath of the mountain wind. The man
seated on the ladder over that bottomless crevasse was himself. And
there were the guides, two from Chamounix, one from Grindelwald, and
that fine young fellow, the son of the elder Chamounix guide, whom they
had lost by a stone-shower on that nameless peak towering to the left of
the glacier. Ah, those had been years of _life_, those _Wanderjahre_! He
ran over the photographs with a kind of greed, his mind meanwhile losing
itself in covetous memories of foamy seas, of long, low, tropical shores
with their scattered palms, of superb rivers sweeping with sound and
fury round innumerable islands, of great buildings ivory white amid the
wealth of creepers which had pulled them into ruin, vacant now for ever
of the voice of man, and ringed by untrodden forests.

"'Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay,'" he thought.
"Ah! but how much did the man who wrote that know about Cathay?"

And with his hands thrust into his pockets, he stood lost awhile in a
flying dream that defied civilisation and its cares. How well, how
indispensable to remember, that beyond these sweltering streets where we
choke and swarm, Cathay stands always waiting! _Somewhere_, while we
toil in the gloom and the crowd, there is _air_, there is _sea_, the joy
of the sun, the life of the body, so good, so satisfying! This
interminable ethical or economical battle, these struggles selfish or
altruistic, in which we shout ourselves hoarse to no purpose--why! they
could be shaken off at a moment's notice!

"However"--he turned on his heel--"suppose we try a few other trifles
first. What time? those fellows won't have gone to bed yet!"

He took out his watch, then extinguished his candles, and made his way
to the street. A hundred yards or so away from his own door he stopped
before a well-known fashionable club, extremely small, and extremely
select, where his mother's brother, the peer of the family, had
introduced him when he was young and tender, and hi