the less I see of her," said Jack, "the worse I get, so I've determined that the more I see of her in the ordinary way, the better. It sounds an unusual treatment, I know, but you must acknowledge I gave the other method a fair chance. I went and killed pigs in Austria, and climbed the Matterhorn, but it wouldn't do."
They rode on a little time in silence. Then Bertie said,—
"Do you want my advice?"
"Well, yes," said Jack rather dubiously.
"Then I'm dashed if I like it, Jack," he said. "It's too dangerous. Just think——"
But Jack broke in,—
"Don't you see my friendship for Chesterford is an absolute safeguard. Dodo gives me more pleasure than anyone I know, and when I can't see her, life becomes unbearable. Chesterford is one of those men to whom one couldn't do a mean thing, and, furthermore, Dodo doesn't love me. If those two facts don't ensure safety, I don't know what would. Besides, Bertie, I'm not a rascal."
"I can't like it," said Bertie. "If one has a propensity for falling into the fire, it's as well to keep off the hearthrug. I know you're not a rascal, but this is a thing one can't argue about. It is a matter of feeling."
"I know," said Jack, "I've felt it too. But I think it's outweighed by other considerations. If I thought any mischief could come of it, I should deserve to be horse-whipped."
"I don't like it," repeated Bertie stolidly.
Jack went to see Dodo the next afternoon, and for many afternoons during the next fortnight he might have been seen on Chesterford's doorstep, either coming or going. Her husband seemed almost as glad as Dodo that Jack should come often. His visits were obviously very pleasant to her, and she had begun to talk nonsense again as fluently as ever. With Jack, however, she had some rather serious talks; his future appeared to be exercising her mind somewhat. Jack's life at this time was absolutely aimless. Before he had gone abroad he had been at the Bar, and had been called, but his chambers now knew him no more. He had no home duties, being, as Dodo expressed it, "a poor little orphan of six foot two," and he had enough money for an idle bachelor life. Dodo took a very real interest in the career of her friends. It was part of her completeness, as I have said before, to be the centre of a set of successful people. Jack could do very well, she felt, in the purely ornamental line, and she by no means wished to debar him from the ornamental profession, but yet she was vaguely dissatisfied. She induced him one day to state in full, exactly the ideas he had about his own future.
"You dangle very well indeed," she said to him, "and I'm far from wishing you not to dangle, but, if it's to be your profession, you must do it more systematically. Lady Wrayston was here yesterday, and she said no one ever saw you now. That's lazy; you're neglecting your work."
Jack was silent a few minutes. The truth of the matter was that he was becoming so preoccupied with Dodo, that he was acquiring a real distaste for other society. His days seemed to have dwindled down to an hour or two hours each, according to the time he passed with Dodo. The interval between his leaving the house one day and returning to it the next, had got to be merely a tedious period of waiting, which he would gladly have dispensed with. In such intervals society appeared to him not a distraction, but a laborious substitute for inaction, and labour at any time was not congenial to him. His life, in fact, was a series of conscious pulses with long-drawn pauses in between. He was dimly aware that this sort of thing could not go on for ever. The machine would stop, or get quicker or slower, and there were endless complications imminent in either case.
"I don't know that I really care for dangling," said Jack discontentedly. "At the same time it is the least objectionable form of amusement."
"Well, you can't dangle for ever in any case," said Dodo. "You ought to marry and settle down. Chesterford is a sort of apotheosis of a dangler. By performing, with scrupulous care, a quantity of little things that don't matter much, like being J.P., and handing the offertory plate, he is in a way quite a busy man, to himself at least, though nothing would happen if he ceased doing any or all of these things; and the dangler, who thinks himself busy, is the happiest of men, because he gets all the advantages of dangling, and none of the disadvantages, and his conscience—have you got a conscience, Jack?—so far from pricking him, tells him he's doing the whole duty of man. Then again he's married—to me, too. That's a profession in itself."
"Ah, but I can't be married to you too," remarked Jack.
"You're absurd," said Dodo; "but really, Jack, I wish you'd marry someone else. I sha'n't think you unfaithful."
"I don't flatter myself that you would," said Jack, with a touch of irritation.
Dodo looked up rather surprised at the hard ring in his voice. She thought it wiser to ignore this last remark.
"I never can quite make out whether you are ambitious or not," she said. "Now and then you make me feel as if you would rather like to go and live in a small cathedral town——"
"And shock the canons?" suggested Jack.
"Not necessarily; but cultivate sheer domesticity. You're very domestic in a way. Bertie would do admirably in a cathedral town. He'd be dreadfully happy among dull people. They would all think him so brilliant and charming, and the bishop would ask him over to dine at the palace whenever anyone came down from London."
"I'm not ambitious in the way of wanting to score small successes," said Jack. "Anyone can score them. I don't mind flying at high game and missing. If you miss of course you have to load again, but I'd sooner do that than make a bag of rabbits. Besides, you can get your rabbits sitting, as you go after your high game. But I don't want rabbits."
"What is your high game?" asked Dodo.
Jack considered.
"It's this," he said. "You may attain it, or at any rate strive after it, by doing nothing, or working like a horse. But, anyhow, it's being in the midst of things, it's seeing the wheels go round, and forming conclusions as to why they go round, it's hearing the world go rushing by like a river in flood, it's knowing what everyone thinks about, it's guessing why one woman falls in love with one man, and why another man falls in love with her. You don't get that in cathedral towns. The archdeacon's daughter falls in love with the dean's son, and nobody else is at all in love with either of them. The world doesn't rattle in cathedral towns, they take care to oil it; the world doesn't come down in flood in cathedral towns, there is nothing so badly regulated as that. I don't know why I should choose cathedral towns particularly to say these things about. I think you suggested that I should live in one. If you like you can plunge into the river in flood and go down with it—that's what they call having a profession—but it's just as instructive to stand on the bank and watch it; more instructive, perhaps, because you needn't swim, and can give your whole attention to it. On the whole, that is what I mean to do."
"That's good, Jack," said Dodo; "but you're not consistent. The fact that you haven't been going out lately, shows that you're standing with your back to it, with your hands in your pocket. After all, what you say only conies to this, that you are interested in the problem of human life. Well, there's just as much human life in your cathedral town."
"Ah, but there's no go about it," said he. "It's no more like life than a duck pond is to the river in flood."
"Oh, you're wrong there," said Dodo. "It goes on just the same, though it doesn't make such a fuss. But in any case you are standing with your back to it now, as I said."
"I'm going into details, just at present," said Jack.
"How
