his head. "The whole thing is rot!" he affirmed,
enigmatically.

"What whole thing?" The broker perched on the edge of his desk, and with
patient philosophy took him up. "Do you mean eighty thousand a year is
rot? That depends upon the man who has it."

"I know that well enough," broke in the other, heavily. "That's what I'm
kicking about. I'm no good!"

Semple, looking attentively down upon him, pursed his lips in
reflection. "That's not the case," he observed with argumentative
calmness. "You're a great deal of good. I'm not so sure that what you've
been trying to do is any good, though. Come!--I read you like large
print. You've set out to live the life of a rich country squire--and it
hasn't come off. It couldn't come off! I never believed it would. You
haven't the taste for it inbred in your bones. You haven't the thousand
little habits and interests that they take in with their mother's milk,
and that make such a life possible. When you look at a hedge, you don't
think of it as something to worry live animals out of. When you see one
of your labourers, you don't care who his father was, or which dairymaid
his uncle ought to have married, if he had wanted to get a certain
cottage. You don't want to know the name of everybody whose roof you can
see; much less could you remember them, and talk about them, and listen
to gossip about them, year after year. It isn't a passion in your blood
to ride to hounds, and to shoot, and all that. It doesn't come to you
by tradition--and you haven't the vacancy of mind which might be a
substitute for tradition. What are you doing in the country, then? Just
eating too much, and sitting about, and getting fat and stupid. If you
want the truth, there it is for you."

Thorpe, putting out his lips judicially, inclined upon reflection to the
view that this was the truth. "That's all right, as far as it goes," he
assented, with hesitation. "But what the hell else is there?"

The little Scotchman had grown too interested in his diagnosis to drop
it in an incomplete state. "A year ago," he went on, "you had won your
victories like a veritable Napoleon. You had everything in your own
hands; Napoleon himself was not more the master of what he saw about
him than you were. And then what did you do? You voluntarily retired
yourself to your Elba. It wasn't that you were beaten and driven there
by others; you went of your own accord. Have you ever thought, Thorpe,
of this? Napoleon was the gr