The thoughts that had crossed his mind when he had looked on his brother’s inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he felt something like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summer dawn, as he had seen now, the boy’s bright face, haggard and pale with the premature miseries of the gamester, or heard his half-piteous, half-querulous lamentations over his losses; and he would essay, with all the consummate tact the world had taught him, to persuade him from his recklessness, and warn him of the consequences.  But little Berk, though he loved his elder after a fashion, was wayward, selfish, and unstable as water.  He would be very sorry sometimes, very repentant, and would promise anything under the sun; but five minutes afterward he would go his own way just the same, and be as irritably resentful of interference as a proud, spoiled, still-childish temper can be.  And Cecil—­the last man in the world to turn mentor—­would light a cheroot, as he did to-night, and forget all about it.  The boy would be right enough when he had had his swing, he thought.  Bertie’s philosophy was the essence of laissez-faire.

He would have defied a Manfred, or an Aylmer of Aylmer’s Field, to be long pursued by remorse or care if he drank the right cru and lived in the right set.  “If it be very severe,” he would say, “it may give him a pang once a twelvemonth—­say the morning after a whitebait dinner.  Repentance is generally the fruit of indigestion, and contrition may generally be traced to too many truffles or olives.”

Cecil had no time or space for thought; he never thought; would not have thought seriously, for a kingdom.  A novel, idly skimmed over in bed, was the extent of his literature; he never bored himself by reading the papers, he heard the news earlier than they told it; and as he lived, he was too constantly supplied from the world about him with amusement and variety to have to do anything beyond letting himself be amused; quietly fanned, as it were, with the lulling punka of social pleasure, without even the trouble of pulling the strings.  He had naturally considerable talents, and an almost dangerous facility in them; but he might have been as brainless as a mollusk, for any exertion he gave his brain.

“If I were a professional diner-out, you know, I’d use such wits as I have:  but why should I now?” he said on one occasion, when a fair lady reproached him with this inertia.  “The best style is only just to say yes or no—­and be bored even in saying that—­and a very comfortable style it is, too.  You get amused without the trouble of opening your lips.”

“But if everybody were equally monosyllabic, how then?  You would not get amused,” suggested his interrogator, a brilliant Parisienne.

“Well—­everybody is, pretty nearly,” said Bertie; “but there are always a lot of fellows who give their wits to get their dinners—­social rockets, you know—­who will always fire themselves off to sparkle instead of you, if you give them a white ball at the clubs, or get them a card for good houses.  It saves you so much trouble; it is such a bore to have to talk.”