“They might have been given me,” said Frank, smiling.

“They fit you too well for that.”

“I’ll change them when I get a chance,” observed Frank.

“It would be as well,” assented the Major.

* * * * *

Somehow or another the sense of sordidness, which presently began to affect Frank so profoundly, descended on him for the first time that night.  He had managed, by his very solitariness hitherto, to escape it so far.  It had been possible to keep up a kind of pose so far; to imagine the adventure in the light of a very much prolonged and very realistic picnic.  But with this other man the thing became impossible.  It was tolerable to wash one’s own socks; it was not so tolerable to see another man’s socks hung up on the peeling mantelpiece a foot away from his own head, and to see two dirty ankles, not his own, emerging from crazy boots.

The Major, too, presently, when he grew a trifle maudlin over his own sorrows, began to call him “Frankie,” and “my boy,” and somehow it mattered, from a man with the Major’s obvious record.  Frank pulled himself up only just in time to prevent a retort when it first happened, but it was not the slightest use to be resentful.  The thing had to be borne.  And it became easier when it occurred to him to regard the Major as a study; it was even interesting to hear him give himself away, yet all with a pompous appearance of self-respect, and to recount his first meeting with Gertie, now asleep upstairs.

The man was, in fact, exactly what Frank, in his prosperous days, would have labeled “Bounder.”  He had a number of meaningless little mannerisms—­a way of passing his hand over his mustache, a trick of bringing a look of veiled insolence into his eyes; there were subjects he could not keep away from—­among them Harrow School, the Universities (which he called ’Varsity), the regiment he had belonged to, and a certain type of adventure connected with women and champagne.  And underneath the whole crust of what the Major took to be breeding, there was a piteous revelation of a feeble, vindictive, and rather nasty character.  It became more and more evident that the cheating incident—­or, rather, the accusation, as he persisted in calling it—­was merely the last straw in his fall, and that the whole thing had been the result of a crumbly unprincipled kind of will underneath, rather than of any particular strain of vice.  He appeared, even now, to think that his traveling about with a woman who was not his wife was a sort of remnant of fallen splendor—­as a man might keep a couple of silver spoons out of the ruin of his house.

“I recommend you to pick up with one,” remarked the Major.  “There are plenty to be had, if you go about it the right way.”

“Thanks,” said Frank, “but it’s not my line.”

(IV)

The morning, too, was a little trying.