bers in
the Club, four of them busy with supper and one reading in front of the
fireplace. There is only one room to the Club, and one long table. At
the far end of the room the fire of the grill glows red, and, when the
fat falls, blazes into flame, and at the other there is a broad bow
window of diamond panes, which looks down upon the street. The four men
at the table were strangers to each other, but as they picked at the
grilled bones, and sipped their Scotch and soda, they conversed with
such charming animation that a visitor to the Club, which does
not tolerate visitors, would have counted them as friends of long
acquaintance, certainly not as Englishmen who had met for the first
time, and without the form of an introduction. But it is the etiquette
and tradition of the Grill, that whoever enters it must speak with
whomever he finds there. It is to enforce this rule that there is but
one long table, and whether there are twenty men at it or two, the
waiters, supporting the rule, will place them side by side.

For this reason the four strangers at supper were seated together, with
the candles grouped about them, and the long length of the table cutting
a white path through the outer gloom.

"I repeat," said the gentleman with the black pearl stud, "that the days
for romantic adventure and deeds of foolish daring have passed, and that
the fault lies with ourselves. Voyages to the pole I do not catalogue
as adventures. That African explorer, young Chetney, who turned up
yesterday after he was supposed to have died in Uganda, did nothing
adventurous. He made maps and explored the sources of rivers. He was
in constant danger, but the presence of danger does not constitute
adventure. Were that so, the chemist who studies high explosives, or
who investigates deadly poisons, passes through adventures daily. No,
'adventures are for the adventurous.' But one no longer ventures. The
spirit of it has died of inertia. We are grown too practical, too just,
above all, too sensible. In this room, for instance, members of this
Club have, at the sword's point, disputed the proper scanning of one
of Pope's couplets. Over so weighty a matter as spilled Burgundy on a
gentleman's cuff, ten men fought across this table, each with his
rapier in one hand and a candle in the other. All ten were wounded. The
question of the spilled Burgundy concerned but two of them. The eight
others engaged because they were men of 'spirit.' They were, i