moping by your fire or
wander out among a crowd of laughing couples, damnably alone; the lack
of any purpose in life; the constant cadging round for somebody to save
you from a Soho restaurant. Good lord, it simply can't be true I had
five years of it, and now...! Of course, Hubert, I know what you'll
say. We're all different; you're not that sort; you never feel all
this; you wouldn't feel as I do, if you married. But you do--you
would. We're all utterly the same, deep down. You novelists forge
little differences to help out your stories, but I tell you, deep down,
men are all the same. We all get lonely, we all get sad and hopeless
as the years go on, we want just _one_ who values us more than the
rest, who cares for our success, who smoothes away our failures. We
can't, any one of us, get on alone. You're only shy, that's all. You
funk proposing--you'd feel such a fool! But what's all that? There
must be lots of jolly girls about. Just you fix on one, get married,
and then come and settle down near us, out Hampstead way. Think of it!
No climbing back into a grimy lodging--sorry, old man, but I mean the
fogs. If you could just see Hampstead in a winter sunset! Then a nice
little home, all new and clean; tea all put ready for you by your wife;
the kiddies keen to see you; that's the one way, I tell you, for _all_
men to come home. We're not different, a bit. We all want--_you_
want--love and comradeship; we want another thing beside ourselves, in
whose success we can feel proud; we want our wife, our children, and we
want our home. And that's exactly what you want, my boy!"

Carried along midway, he suddenly became self-conscious and collapsed
with the last sentence.

Hubert ironically clapped his hands. "Splendid, splendid! You ought
to write advertisements; I'm sure the Garden City would pay a big
premium. Title, 'The New Home!'"

He was much too absorbed to notice the hurt look that came over the
other's face. Kenneth Boyd had been expensively educated, as a boy, in
all English ideals. He never had dared, until just now, to show his
Self to any one except his wife. Now, when it was mocked at, he felt a
hideous shame, a terrible resentment. And he had only wished to help
his friend!

Hubert contentedly passed on to the analysis of his own state, a plea
for his own attitude. "I am different, though," he said, "all the
same. You can't understand. My job, for one thing, is so different.