“Are you?”

Captain Eliott was.  Infernally tired.  He only hung on to his berth so long in order to get his pension on the highest scale before he went home.  It would be no better than poverty, anyhow; still, it was the only thing between him and the workhouse.  And he had a family.  Three girls, as Whalley knew.  He gave “Harry, old boy,” to understand that these three girls were a source of the greatest anxiety and worry to him.  Enough to drive a man distracted.

“Why?  What have they been doing now?” asked Captain Whalley with a sort of amused absent-mindedness.

“Doing!  Doing nothing.  That’s just it.  Lawn-tennis and silly novels from morning to night. . . .”

If one of them at least had been a boy.  But all three!  And, as ill-luck would have it, there did not seem to be any decent young fellows left in the world.  When he looked around in the club he saw only a lot of conceited popinjays too selfish to think of making a good woman happy.  Extreme indigence stared him in the face with all that crowd to keep at home.  He had cherished the idea of building himself a little house in the country—­in Surrey—­to end his days in, but he was afraid it was out of the question, . . . and his staring eyes rolled upwards with such a pathetic anxiety that Captain Whalley charitably nodded down at him, restraining a sort of sickening desire to laugh.

“You must know what it is yourself, Harry.  Girls are the very devil for worry and anxiety.”

“Ay!  But mine is doing well,” Captain Whalley pronounced slowly, staring to the end of the avenue.

The Master-Attendant was glad to hear this.  Uncommonly glad.  He remembered her well.  A pretty girl she was.

Captain Whalley, stepping out carelessly, assented as if in a dream.

“She was pretty.”

The procession of carriages was breaking up.

One after another they left the file to go off at a trot, animating the vast avenue with their scattered life and movement; but soon the aspect of dignified solitude returned and took possession of the straight wide road.  A syce in white stood at the head of a Burmah pony harnessed to a varnished two-wheel cart; and the whole thing waiting by the curb seemed no bigger than a child’s toy forgotten under the soaring trees.  Captain Eliott waddled up to it and made as if to clamber in, but refrained; and keeping one hand resting easily on the shaft, he changed the conversation from his pension, his daughters, and his poverty back again to the only other topic in the world—­the Marine Office, the men and the ships of the port.