As a matter of fact, Peter gave his friend an agreeable surprise.  He went in, or attempted to go in, for a good many things.  He plunged ardently into football, though he had never been good, and though he always got extremely tired over it, which was supposed to be bad for him, and frequently got smashed up, which he knew to be unpleasant for him.  This came to an abrupt end half way through the term.  Then he took, quite suddenly, to motor bicycling.  All this is merely to say that the incalculable factor that sets temperament and natural predilection at nought had entered into Peter’s life.  Of course, it was absurd.  Urquhart, being what he was, could successfully do a number of things that Peter, being what he was, must inevitably come to grief over.  But still he indomitably tried.  He even profaned the roads and outraged all aesthetic fitness in the endeavour, clacking into the country upon a hired motor-bicycle and making his head ache badly and getting very cold, and being from time to time thrown off and jumped upon and going about in bandages, telling enquirers that he supposed he must have knocked against something somewhere, he didn’t remember exactly.  The energetic friend had been caustic.

“I’ve no intention of sympathising with you,” he had remarked; “because you deserve all you get.  You ass, you know when it’s possible to get smashed up over anything you’re safe to do it, so what on earth do you expect when you take up a thing like this?”

“Instant death every minute,” Peter had truly replied. (His nerves had been a little shaken by his last ride, which had set his trouser-leg on fire suddenly, and nearly, as he remarked, burnt him to death.) “But I go on.  I expect the worst, but I am resigned.  The hero is not he who feels no fear, for that were brutal and irrational.”

“What do you do it for?” his friend had querulously and superfluously demanded.

“It’s so frightfully funny,” Peter had said, reflecting, “that I should be doing it.  That’s why, I suppose.  It makes me laugh.  You might take to the fiddle if you wanted a good laugh.  I take to my motor-bicycle.  It’s the only way to cheer oneself up when life is disappointing, to go and do something entirely ridiculous.  I used to stand on my head when I’d been rowed or sat upon, or when there was a beastly wind; it cheered me a lot.  I’ve given that up now; so I motor-bicycle.  Besides,” he had added, “you said I must go in for something.  You wouldn’t like it if I did my embroidery all day.”

But on the days when he had been motor-bicycling, Peter had to do a great deal of embroidery in the evenings, for the sake of the change.

“I don’t wonder you need it,” a friend of the more aesthetically cultured type remarked one evening, finding him doing it.  “You’ve been playing round with the Urquhart-Fitzmaurice lot to-day, haven’t you?  Nice man, Fitzmaurice, isn’t he?  I like his tie-pins.  You know, we almost lost him last summer.  He hung in the balance, and our hearts were in our mouths.  But he is still with us.  You look as if he had been very much with you, Margery.”