He protested laughingly: 

“I have had no time; I have been looking after my lungs.”

“Ah, you are incorrigible,” she exclaimed, rising; “let us go and find Mary.  I give you up; or, rather, I give myself up, as an adviser.  For, after all, you are right—­there is nothing worth doing in this bad world except looking after one’s lung, or whatever it may be.”

“Perhaps not even that,” said Philip, as he followed her from the room; “even that, after a time, becomes monotonous.”

CHAPTER XIV

It occurred to Lightmark one evening, as he groped through the gloom of his studio, on his way to bed, after assisting at a very charming social gathering at the Sylvesters’, that as soon as he was married he would have to cut Brodonowski’s.  The reasons he gave himself were plausible enough, and, indeed, he would have found himself the only Benedict among this horde of wild bachelors.  The informal circle was of such recent association that, so far, no precedent for matrimony had occurred, and it was more than doubtful how the experiment might be received.  In any case, he told himself, he could not be expected to introduce people like Oswyn and McAllister to his wife—­or, rather, to Mrs. Sylvester’s daughter.  Oswyn was plainly impossible, and McAllister’s devotion to tobacco so inordinate that it had come to be a matter of common belief that he smoked short pipes in his sleep.

Then he had dismissed the subject; the long, pleasant holiday in Switzerland intervened, and it was only on his return, late in the autumn, that the question again presented itself, as he turned from the threshold of the house in Park Street, where he had been dining, and half unconsciously took the familiar short cut towards Turk Street.  He paused for a deliberate instant when he had hailed the first passing hansom, and then told the man to drive to Piccadilly Circus.

“I must go there a few times more, if only to break it off gently,” he reflected, “and I want to see old Rainham.  It is stupid of me not to have written to him—­yes, stupid!  Wonder if he has heard?  I mustn’t give him up, at any rate.  We’ll—­we’ll ask him to dinner, and all that sort of thing.  And what the deuce am I going to send to the Academy?  Thank goodness, I have enough Swiss sketches to work up for the other galleries to last me for years.  But the Academy——­”

Then he lost himself in contemplative enjoyment of the familiar vista of Regent Street, the curved, dotted lines of crocus-coloured lamps, fading in the evening fog, the flitting, ruby-eyed cabs, and the calm, white arc-lights, set irregularly about the circus, dulling the grosser gas.  He owned to himself that he had secretly yearned for London; that his satisfaction on leaving the vast city was never so great as his joy on again setting foot upon her pavements.