ing any high old time, or rather what you mean--a low
old time. I'm going there to work."

"Oh, we all know you're a saint!" he said derisively. "But--'A doubtful
throne is ice on summer seas!' We shall see how long your virtue lasts
at La Scala and in the Champs Elysees, with Lucia safely packed away in
England!"

I smiled and raised my eyebrows in silence. The point was not worth
discussing. Howard and I looked at some things from such an enormously
different level that conversation on them was merely waste of time. It
was as if a man upon a cliff started a dissertation with another in a
boat lying on the sea beneath. Half the excellent arguments would drift
away upon the wind, lost, rendered nil by the mere difference of level
in the two planes. The two main chains that bound my whole
psychological system--self-control and self-respect--were entirely
absent in him. He looked at his every good action from the point of
utility, at his every bad one from the point of secrecy. He would do
the first if it were useful to him, and the last if it were secret.
These, I believe, were the only two conditions that ever occurred to
him. He was weak, even contemptible, in character, and I could not help
clearly seeing it, but my friendship to him was won over by his
talents, and by a certain good-tempered, easy, pleasant way he had.
Widely different though we were, we had never had a quarrel. We got on
together perfectly, and he might say things to me that would have
offended me from an other man. Liking! Liking! What is it? It is as
difficult to define, as impossible to imprison between the limits of
motives and reasons, of "Whys" and "becauses," as Loving. I liked
Howard, or rather I liked his society, which is not the same thing.
Often the people who are the most disappointing in the great issues of
life are the pleasantest to live with through the trifles of everyday
existence and vice versa. I would not have trusted Howard in a crisis
for any consideration, but then crises don't come every day, and he was
delightful to discuss a chapter or a sonnet with.

"When are you going, by the way? Not to-morrow, I hope, for behold this
room!" and he glanced round helplessly.

It was certainly in the most frightful of literary confusions. Masses
of loose papers, letters, bills, poems, drifted over the tables; books
stood in piles upon the floor; newspapers occupied the chairs.

"No, next week. Shall we say Saturday?"

"All right.