Harry began to be very nervous.  How was he to do it?  It had become clearer and clearer to him through every ten minutes of the dinner, that the count did not intend to give him any moment for private conversation.  He felt that he was cheated and ill-used, and was waxing angry.  They were to go and smoke in a public room, and he knew, or thought he knew, what that meant.  The count would sit there till he went, and had brought the Colonel Schmoff with him, so that he might be sure of some ally to remain by his side and ensure silence.  And the count, doubtless, had calculated that when Captain Boodle went, as he soon would go, to his billiards, he, Harry Clavering, would feel himself compelled to go also.  No!  It should not result in that way.  Harry resolved that he would not go.  He had his mission to perform and he would perform it, even if he were compelled to do so in the presence of Colonel Schmoff.

Doodles soon went.  He could not sit long with the simple gratification of a cigar, without gin-and-water or other comfort of that kind, even though the eloquence of Count Pateroff might be excited in his favor.  He was a man, indeed, who did not love to sit still, even with the comfort of gin-and-water.  An active little man was Captain Boodle, always doing something or anxious to do something in his own line of business.  Small speculations in money, so concocted as to leave the risk against him smaller than the chance on his side, constituted Captain Boodle’s trade; and in that trade he was indefatigable, ingenious, and, to a certain extent, successful.  The worst of the trade was this:  that though he worked at it about twelve hours a day, to the exclusion of all other interests in life, he could only make out of it an income which would have been considered a beggarly failure at any other profession.  When he netted a pound a day he considered himself to have done very well; but he could not do that every day in the week.  To do it often required unremitting exertion.  And then, in spite of all his care, misfortunes would come.  “A cursed garron, of whom nobody had ever heard the name!  If a man mayn’t take the liberty with such a brute as that, when is he to take a liberty?” So had he expressed himself plaintively, endeavoring to excuse himself when on some occasion a race had been won by some outside horse which Captain Boodle had omitted to make safe in his betting-book.  He was regarded by his intimate friends as a very successful man; but I think myself that his life was a mistake.  To live with one’s hands ever daubed with chalk from a billiard-table, to be always spying into stables and rubbing against grooms, to put up with the narrow lodgings which needy men encounter at race meetings, to be day after day on the rails running after platers and steeple-chasers, to be conscious on all occasions of the expediency of selling your beast when you are hunting, to be counting up little odds at all your spare moments—­these things do not, I think, make a satisfactory life for a young man.  And for a man that is not young, they are the very devil!  Better have no digestion when you are forty than find yourself living such a life as that!  Captain Boodle would, I think, have been happier had he contrived to get himself employed as a tax-gatherer or an attorney’s clerk.