s losses; and he would essay, with
all the consummate tact the world had taught him, to persuade him from
his recklessness, and warn him of the consequences. But little Berk,
though he loved his elder after a fashion, was wayward, selfish, and
unstable as water. He would be very sorry sometimes, very repentant,
and would promise anything under the sun; but five minutes afterward
he would go his own way just the same, and be as irritably resentful
of interference as a proud, spoiled, still-childish temper can be. And
Cecil--the last man in the world to turn mentor--would light a cheroot,
as he did to-night, and forget all about it. The boy would be right
enough when he had had his swing, he thought. Bertie's philosophy was
the essence of laissez-faire.

He would have defied a Manfred, or an Aylmer of Aylmer's Field, to be
long pursued by remorse or care if he drank the right cru and lived in
the right set. "If it be very severe," he would say, "it may give him
a pang once a twelvemonth--say the morning after a whitebait dinner.
Repentance is generally the fruit of indigestion, and contrition may
generally be traced to too many truffles or olives."

Cecil had no time or space for thought; he never thought; would not have
thought seriously, for a kingdom. A novel, idly skimmed over in bed,
was the extent of his literature; he never bored himself by reading the
papers, he heard the news earlier than they told it; and as he lived, he
was too constantly supplied from the world about him with amusement and
variety to have to do anything beyond letting himself be amused; quietly
fanned, as it were, with the lulling punka of social pleasure, without
even the trouble of pulling the strings. He had naturally considerable
talents, and an almost dangerous facility in them; but he might have
been as brainless as a mollusk, for any exertion he gave his brain.

"If I were a professional diner-out, you know, I'd use such wits as I
have: but why should I now?" he said on one occasion, when a fair lady
reproached him with this inertia. "The best style is only just to say
yes or no--and be bored even in saying that--and a very comfortable
style it is, too. You get amused without the trouble of opening your
lips."

"But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then? You would not get
amused," suggested his interrogator, a brilliant Parisienne.

"Well--everybody is, pretty nearly," said Bertie; "but there are always
a lot of fellows