Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/103

Rh to profane speculation—the door of the dingy Temple chambers in which, after the most extravagant holiday of his life, Henry Chilver had found it salutary to sit and imagine himself 'reading.' But Braddle had always been, portentously, a person of free mornings—his nominal occupation that of looking after his father's 'interests,' and his actual that of spending, though quite without scandal, this personage's money, of which, luckily, there seemed an abundance. What came from him on this occasion connected itself with something that had passed between them on their previous meeting, the one immediately following the incident at Liverpool. Chilver had at that time been rather surprised to hear his friend suddenly bring out: 'You don't then think there's anything "off" about her?'

'Off?' Chilver could at least be perfectly vague. 'Off what?'

'What's the beastly phrase? "Off colour." I mean do you think she's all right?'

'Are you in love with her?' Chilver after a moment demanded.

'Damn it, of course I'm in love with her!' Braddle joylessly articulated.

'Well then, doesn't that give you?'

'Give me what?' he asked with impatience at his companion's pause.

'Well, a sort of searching light'

'For reading her clear?' Braddle broke in. 'How can you ask—as a man of the world—anything so idiotic? Where did you ever discover that being in love makes a searching light, makes anything but a most damnable and demoralising darkness? One has been in love with creatures such that one's condition has lighted nothing in the world but one's asininity. I have at any rate. And so have you!'

'No, I've never been really in love at all,' said Chilver, good-humouredly.