re a replica of Damon and Pythias! Won't it do you a bit
of good to talk it over? Do you never feel the need of confiding in a
friend, nowadays?"

For a moment he looked down at his boots, after which he deliberately
placed both elbows on the little table that separated us and stared at
me.

"The announcement is all right. Bought a solitaire for her last week. I
suppose that she is wearing it. There is to be a reception soon, and
you'll get a card to it."

I pushed my hand over to him and he took it, rather lukewarmly.

"Oh! That's all right! I know you wish me happiness. Well, I'm getting
it, am I not? I'm just as merry as a grig. Here, boy!"

The lad in buttons took his order for whiskies and soda, after which
Gordon glared at the portrait of the club's distinguished first
president.

"Rotten piece of work, I call it. Chap who did it used a lot of beastly
bitumen too, and it's cracking all over. Awful rubbishy stuff."

"I suppose so," I assented, on faith.

"Ben Franklin was a shrewd old fellow," he continued, with one of his
habitual lightning changes. "Tells us that a man without a woman is like
half a pair of scissors. I'm to be the complete thing, now. Stunning
girl, Miss Van Rossum, isn't she? She talks of having a studio built at
Southampton, for effect, I presume. How the deuce could a fellow expect
to paint with a parcel of chattering women around him?"

"Oh! I daresay you might get used to it," I told him, soothingly.

"I won't! She is going to read books about painting. Told me she wanted
to be able to talk intelligently about it, and I advised against it.
People don't talk intelligently about painting, they only pretend to.
They must insist on airing their views about futurists, or the influence
of Botticelli or such truck. They make me yawn, and I try to turn the
conversation, but it's a tough job. Why the deuce are you looking at me
like that?"

He snapped the question out so quickly that I was somewhat taken aback,
and he began again, without waiting for an answer.

"Oh! It's no use trying to make a practical man of the world out of a
sentimental writer of impossible love stories. You're staring at me
because I don't answer to your preconceived ideas of a fellow
contemplating the joys of matrimony. Why the deuce should I?"

"I don't know, old fellow," I confessed. "I acknowledge that I have
always regarded wedded life in the abstract, but I must say that my----"

"I know. Your ideal is a