patent-medicines; worked in a ruby mine; been a haberdasher in the
Whiteaway, Laidlaw shop in Bombay; cut wood in the teak forests; helped
exterminate the plague at Chitor and Udaipur; and never saved a penny.
I never had an adventure in all my life."

"Why, your wanderings were adventures," she insisted. "Think of the
things you could tell!"

"And never will," a smile breaking over his face.

How like Arthur's that smile was! thought the girl. "Romantic persons
never have any adventures. It is to the prosaic these things fall.
Because of their nearness you lose their values."

"There is some difference between romance and adventure. Romance is
what you look forward to; adventure is something you look back upon.
If many disagreeable occupations, hunger and an occasional fisticuff,
may be classed as adventure, then I have had my run of it. But I
always supposed adventure was the finding of treasures, on land and on
sea; of filibustering; of fighting with sabers and pistols, and all
that rigmarole. I can't quite lift my imagination up to the height of
calling my six months' shovel-engineering on _The Galle_ an adventure.
It was brutal hard work; and many times I wanted to jump over. The
Lascars often got out of trouble that way."

"It all depends upon how we look at things." She touched the
parrot-cage with her foot, and Rajah hissed. "What would you say if I
told you that I was unconventional enough to ask the purser to
introduce you?"