' You seemed to be enjoying yourself,' said his brother.
' I was, enormously. But it's great and merciful, all the same. That's all. Oh no, one thing more. Bertie, I think your girl is worth the rest of this continent. News? Yes, news from Davos. Charlie is better, ever so much better, and his nurse throughout has been Sybil. In fact, there is going to be love in a cottage, I think. Charlie writes. He seems to like the idea of a cottage.'
' She's going to marry him?' asked Bertie.
Ginger smiled.
' Now I come to think of it, he doesn't mention the word,' he observed.
' You're rather coarse,' remarked Bertie.
' I am. I thought it might cheer you up. You look rather down. Anything wrong?'
' Nothing whatever.'
Ginger strolled back to his chair, put his whisky on one arm, a little heap of cigarettes on the other, and curled himself up between them.
' The young folk are all growing up and being married,' he said. ' It makes me feel extremely old, and it is a little uncomfortable. I've done nothing—but that might happen to anybody—and I've felt nothing. What is it like to feel things, Bertie?'
' Depends what they are.'
' No, I mean independently of what they are. I don't know what strong emotion is. I don't know what it is to be carried off one's feet. I am much interested in many things, but impersonally. Now, you—you have adored, and you have been adored. I have sat and looked on. Does it leave you duller, do you think, to feel a thing, and then cease to feel it, than you would have been if you never felt it at all?'
Bertie considered this a moment.
' You never cease to feel things,' he said. ' A thing that
