for afternoon calls and tea-drinking, that may be an interesting
occupation for young gentlemen in search of a wife, but it is too
ghastly a business for one who has no such views. What then? More
newspapers? More tedious lounging in the hushed library? Or how were the
"impracticable hours" to be disposed of before came night and sleep?

George Brand did not stay to consider that, when a man in the prime of
health and vigor, possessed of an ample fortune, unfettered by anybody's
will but his own, and burdened by neither remorse nor regret,
nevertheless begins to find life a thing too tedious to be borne, there
must be a cause for it. On the contrary, instead of asking himself any
questions, he set about getting through the daily programme with an
Englishman's determination to be prepared for the worst. He walked up to
his club, the Waldegrave, in Pall Mall. In the morning-room there were
only two or three old gentlemen, seated in easy-chairs near the fire,
and grumbling in a loud voice--for apparently one or two were rather
deaf--about the weather. Brand glanced at a few more newspapers. Then a
happy idea occurred to him; he would go up to the smoking-room and smoke
a cigarette.

In this vast hall of a place there were only two persons--one standing
with his back to the fire, the other lying back in an easy-chair. The
one was a florid, elderly gentleman, who was first cousin to a junior
Lord of the Treasury, and therefore claimed to be a profound authority
on politics, home and foreign. He was a harmless poor devil enough, from
whom a merciful Providence had concealed the fact that his brain-power
was of the smallest. His companion, reclining in the easy-chair, was a
youthful Fine Art Professor; a gelatinous creature, a bundle of languid
affectations, with the added and fluttering self-consciousness of a
school-miss. He was absently assenting to the propositions of the florid