“No, my dear-experience. Do you remember Jimmy Buckley? No, you wouldn’t-he was before your time. Well, it’s a very instructive story. Jimmy went smash, and all Jimmy’s pals rallied round, and pressed fivers into his hand, and hunted jobs for him. And when Jimmy didn’t keep the jobs, they hunted more, but not quite so enthusiastically, and they stopped pressing fivers on him. And when they stopped, Jimmy started asking, and the last I heard of him was that he’d settled down to a permanent job of writing begging letters-very systematic and regular. He’d work through all his relations, and then get on to his pals-only by that time they weren’t pals any more, and he was ‘that damned fellow Buckley,’ or ‘Jimmy, poor devil.’ And that’s that. Jimmy, my dear, is an awful warning. See?”

“There might be something between sponging on your friends and cutting them dead.”

“Facilis descensus!” I said.

She put out her hand, but I stepped back from it.

“There’s your uncle, Car-why wouldn’t you let him help you? I know he wanted to-he said so-he said he’d offered you the agency.”

I laughed.

“With conditions! Did he tell you what they were?”

She said “No,” quickly and as if I’d hurt her again. I supposed I spoke roughly, for she looked timid, and I felt a brute.

“You couldn’t accept the conditions?” she said in a soft, hesitating way.

I shook my head. I wonder what she would have said if I’d told her that one of the conditions was marriage. What a fool I am! It wouldn’t be anything to her one way or another-it wouldn’t ever have been anything. If I had come to heel, licked my uncle’s hand, taken his bone, and married Anna Lang, she’d have sent me a wedding present and wished me joy. It’s an odd world. Anna wanted me, and I wanted Isobel, and so here I am in the gutter. Why, I never even liked Anna. I remember telling her so at a franker age. I suppose I was about fourteen, and she the same-all bones and eyes.