“I can’t see anything to laugh at,” said Dale sturdily.

And he couldn’t.  There are thousands of bright, flame-like human beings constituted like that.  Life spreads out before them one of its most side-splitting, topsy-turvy farces and they see in it nothing to laugh at.

To Dale the affair had been as serious and lacking in the fantastic as the measles.  He had got over the disease and now was exceedingly sorry to perceive that I had caught it in my turn.

“It isn’t funny a bit,” he continued.  “It’s quite natural.  I see it all now.  You cut me out from the very first.  You didn’t mean to—­you never thought of it.  But what chance had I against you?  I was a young ass and you were a brilliant man of the world.  I bear you no grudge.  You played the game in that way.  Then things happened—­and at last you’ve fallen in love with her—­and now just at the critical moment she has gone off into space.  It must be devilish painful for you, if you ask me.”

“Oh, Dale,” said I, shaking my head, “the only fitting end to the farce would be if you wandered over Europe to find and bring her back to me.”

“I don’t know about that,” said he, “because I’m engaged, and that, as I said, gives me occupation; but if I can do anything practicable, my dear old Simon, you’ve only got to send for me.”

He pulled out his watch.

“My hat!” he exclaimed.  “It’s past two o’clock.”

CHAPTER XXII

I am a personage apart from humanity.  I vary from the kindly ways of man.  A curse is on me.

Surely no man has fought harder than I have done to convince himself of the deadly seriousness of existence; and surely before the feet of no man has Destiny cast such stumbling-blocks to faith.  I might be an ancient dweller in the Thebaid struggling towards dreams of celestial habitations, and confronted only by grotesque visions of hell.  No matter what I do, I’m baffled.  I look upon sorrow and say, “Lo, this is tragedy!” and hey, presto! a trick of lightning turns it into farce.  I cry aloud, in perfervid zeal, “Life is real, life is earnest, and the apotheosis of the fantastic is not its goal,” and immediately a grinning irony comes to give the lie to my credo.

Or is it that, by inscrutable decree of the Almighty Powers, I am undergoing punishment for an old unregenerate point of view, being doomed to wear my detested motley for all eternity, to stretch out my hand for ever to grasp realities and find I can do nought but beat the air with my bladder; to listen with strained ear perpetually expectant of the music of the spheres, and catch nothing but the mocking jingle of the bells on my fool’s cap?

I don’t know.  I give it up.

Such were my thoughts on the morning after my interview with Dale, when I had read a long, long letter from Lola, which she had despatched from Paris.