“Fortunately he left me enough money to go to London, where I’d always wanted to go. And there I looked up a sister of his, much older, unmarried. A pathetic, starved thing, as I see her now. She hugged his memory, and I let her hug it. She was living in a world of her own where all men were Saint Anthonys and Sir Galahads. And she made a Sir Galahad of me—well, I was one then. Poor soul, she got very dotty about me, but before I’d been there more than six months she died, and then I found she had left me her money.”
“And what next?”
He smiled at this inquisition. “Let’s see, I stayed on in London for a year, then I went to Paris and then to Berlin, and I rambled about Europe, and on into Persia and back to India and the East. It was the East that hypnotized me. Sometimes now I wish I had stayed there. But the climate worried me, and the life the Anglo-Saxon leads is pretty rotten, and I could not have kept out of it. I hankered after Sydney again too, and so I went back when I was twenty-four and began to write. I’ve run about the Islands and New Guinea and this country of yours since then, and, well, now I’m here.”
He took a long puff and stared down into the fire.
“Yes here, after all that,” she said slowly.
“Well, why not?”
“There must be so much you miss.”
“Yes, and very glad I am to miss it.”
“Do you intend to stay here?”
“I don’t know. But I can consider it calmly. After all a book is a book, and a boat a boat, and a fire a fire all the world over. And then this business of being in the swim in London or Paris or New York is only another of the hypnotisms men succumb to to please themselves. It isn’t as important to live in London as they think it is.
