Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/210

198 covered. "Won't you come in and visit me a little while? I assure you I am getting quite bored and lonely by myself."

Kenneth liked the room into which he stepped. He was still of the chameleon age, capable instantly of taking the mental colour of his surroundings. The worn leather armchairs, the rows and rows of books, the wide fireplace, and the double student-lamp on the magazine-littered table threw him instantly into an appreciative attitude toward a quiet scholarly life by one's fireside, far remote from the turmoil of the world, and so forth. Corbell's ranch house had affected him in a similar manner, though in a different way. Possibly he recognized reality.

He found himself sitting in one of the armchairs at one side the fireplace where oak logs burned quietly. The clearing wind after the rain was singing by the eaves. On Brainerd's invitation he filled a pipe. The conversation for a few moments ran limpingly, for Kenneth was trying, before this quiet, saturnine, wise-seeming individual, to be very intelligent and grown up. But Brainerd let him alone, and after a time the situation eased.

"Yes, California is a delightful place to live in," the older man assented, to Kenneth's remark concluding his account of the quail hunt. "What are you going to do here?" he asked abruptly.

"Do?"

"Yes—as your job. Every man who is worth his salt must have a job, you know."

"I suppose he must."

"You don't want merely to suppose: you want to know it. It's very simple, but people don't seem to grasp it. They seem to think that when a man gets a certain amount of money—enough to live on—that he can stop work if he wants to. Worst sort of fallacy! He may change the kind of work. But the possession of money or leisure merely means that a man has accomplished the first necessary step, and is ready to go on with the next. I suppose merely earning a living and an economic place in the world is made so extraordinarily difficult because so few people go on doing things after that is accomplished. They generally sit down and build bulgy granite houses, and buy more