George Brand did not stay to consider that, when a man in the prime of health and vigor, possessed of an ample fortune, unfettered by anybody’s will but his own, and burdened by neither remorse nor regret, nevertheless begins to find life a thing too tedious to be borne, there must be a cause for it.  On the contrary, instead of asking himself any questions, he set about getting through the daily programme with an Englishman’s determination to be prepared for the worst.  He walked up to his club, the Waldegrave, in Pall Mall.  In the morning-room there were only two or three old gentlemen, seated in easy-chairs near the fire, and grumbling in a loud voice—­for apparently one or two were rather deaf—­about the weather.  Brand glanced at a few more newspapers.  Then a happy idea occurred to him; he would go up to the smoking-room and smoke a cigarette.

In this vast hall of a place there were only two persons—­one standing with his back to the fire, the other lying back in an easy-chair.  The one was a florid, elderly gentleman, who was first cousin to a junior Lord of the Treasury, and therefore claimed to be a profound authority on politics, home and foreign.  He was a harmless poor devil enough, from whom a merciful Providence had concealed the fact that his brain-power was of the smallest.  His companion, reclining in the easy-chair, was a youthful Fine Art Professor; a gelatinous creature, a bundle of languid affectations, with the added and fluttering self-consciousness of a school-miss.  He was absently assenting to the propositions of the florid gentleman; but it is probable that his soul was elsewhere.

These propositions were to the effect that leading articles in a newspaper were a mere impertinence; that he himself never read such things; that the business of a newspaper was to supply news; and that an intelligent Englishman was better capable of forming a judgment on public affairs than the hacks of a newspaper-office.  The intelligent Englishman then proceeded to deliver his own judgment on the question of the day, which turned out to be—­to Mr. Brand’s great surprise—­nothing more nor less than a blundering and inaccurate resume of the opinions expressed in a leading article in that morning’s Times.  At length this one-sided conversation between a jackanapes and a jackass became too intolerable for Brand, who threw away his cigarette, and descended once more into the hall.

“A gentleman wishes to see you, sir,” said a boy; and at the same moment he caught sight of Lord Evelyn.

“Thank God!” he exclaimed, hurrying forward to shake his friend by the hand.  “Come, Evelyn, what are you up to?  I can’t stand England any longer; will you take a run with me?—­Algiers, Egypt, anywhere you like.  Let us drop down to Dover in the afternoon, and settle it there.  Or what do you say to the Riviera? we should be sure to run against some people at one or other of the towns.  Upon my life, if you had not turned up, I think I should have cut my throat before lunch-time.”