Chapter 20 - Page 2

difficulty is to keep your place when you get old and stiff, and younger smatterers are pushing up behind you. Crawl into a boarding-house and you're safe. A master's life is frightfully tragic. Jackson's fairly right himself, because he has got a first-class intellect. But I met a poor brute who was hired as an athlete. He has missed his shot at a boarding-house, and there's nothing in the world for him to do but to trundle down the hill."

Ansell yawned.

"I saw Rickie too. Once I dined there."

Another yawn.

"My cousin thinks Mrs. Elliot one of the most horrible women he has ever seen. He calls her 'Medusa in Arcady.' She's so pleasant, too. But certainly it was a very stony meal."

"What kind of stoniness"

"No one stopped talking for a moment."

"That's the real kind," said Ansell moodily. "The only kind."

"Well, I," he continued, "am inclined to compare her to an electric light. Click! she's on. Click! she's off. No waste. No flicker."

"I wish she'd fuse."

"She'll never fuse--unless anything was to happen at the main."

"What do you mean by the main?" said Ansell, who always pursued a metaphor relentlessly.

Widdrington did not know what he meant, and suggested that Ansell should visit Sawston to see whether one could know.

"It is no good me going. I should not find Mrs. Elliot: she has no real existence."

"Rickie has."

"I very much doubt it. I had two letters from Ilfracombe last April, and I very much doubt that the man who wrote them can exist." Bending downwards he began to adorn the manuscript of his dissertation with a square, and inside that a circle, and inside that another square. It was his second dissertation: the first had failed.

"I think he exists: he is so unhappy."

Ansell nodded. "How did you know he was unhappy?"

"Because he was always talking." After a pause he added, "What clever young men we are!"

"Aren't we? I expect we shall get asked in marriage soon. I say, Widdrington, shall we--?"

"Accept? Of course. It is not young manly to say no."

"I meant shall we ever do a more tremendous thing,--fuse Mrs. Elliot."

"No," said Widdrington promptly. "We shall never do that in all our lives." He added, "I think you might go down to Sawston, though."

"I have already refused or ignored three invitations."

"So I gathered."

"What's the good of it?" said Ansell through his teeth. "1 will not put up with little things. I would rather be rude than to listen to twaddle from a man I've known.

"You might go down to Sawston, just for a night, to see him."

"I saw him last month--at least, so Tilliard informs me. He says that we all three lunched together, that Rickie paid, and that the conversation was most interesting."

"Well, I contend that he does