“Match,” sighed Ferdie.

Boland struck a match; he held the flame to the cigarette’s end.  Ferdie puffed.  Then he eyed his friend with judicial severity.

“Abominably lazy!  Every opportunity—­family, education—­brains, perhaps.  Why don’t you go to work?”

“My few and simple wants—­” Boland waved his hand airily.  “Besides, who am I that I should crowd to the wall some worthy and industrious person?—­practically taking the bread from the chappie’s mouth, you might say.  No, no!” said Mr. Boland with emotion; “I may have my faults, but—­”

“Why don’t you go in for politics?”

“Ferdinand, little as you may deem it, there are limits.”

“You have no ambition whatever?”

“By that sin fell the angels—­and look at them now!”

“Why not take a whirl at law?”

Boland sat up stiffly.  “Mr. Sedgwick,” he observed with exceeding bitterness, “you go too far.  Take back your ring!  Henceforth we meet as str-r-r-rangers!”

“Ever think of writing?  You do enough reading, Heaven knows.”

Mr. Boland relapsed to a sagging sprawl; he adjusted his finger tips to touch with delicate nicety.

“Modesty,” he said with mincing primness, “is the brightest jewel in my crown.  Litter and literature are not identical, really, though the superficial observer might be misled to think so.  And yet, in a higher sense, perhaps, it may almost be said, with careful limitations, that, considering certain delicate nuances of filtered thought, as it were, and making meticulous allowance for the personal equation—­”

“Grisly ass!  Well, then, what’s the matter with the army?”

“My prudence is such,” responded Mr. Boland dreamily—­“in fact, my prudence is so very such, indeed—­one may almost say so extremely such—­not to mention the pertinent and trenchant question so well formulated by the little Peterkin—­”

“Why don’t you marry?”

“Ha!” said Francis Charles.

“Whachamean—­’Ha’?”

“I mean what the poet meant when he spoke so feelingly of the

“------eager boys
Who might have tasted girl’s love and been stung.”

“Didn’t say it.  Who?”

“Did, too!  William Vaughn Moody.  So I say ‘Ha!’ in the deepest and fullest meaning of the word; and I will so defend it with my life.”

“If you were good and married once, you might not be such a fool,” said Sedgwick hopefully.

“Take any form but this”—­Mr. Boland inflated his chest and held himself oratorically erect—­“and my firm nerves shall never tremble!  I have tracked the tufted pocolunas to his lair; I have slain the eight-legged galliwampus; I have bearded the wallipaloova in his noisome den, and gazed into the glaring eyeballs of the fierce Numidian liar; and I’ll try everything once—­except this.  But I have known too many too-charming girls too well.  To love them,” said Francis Charles sadly, “was a business education.”