"My luck isn't altogether luck perhaps," said he, walking on again.
"No?" (With exaggerated surprise.)
"No," pursued Garve, "it's keeping a cool head, and carefully regulating my life with a view to my play in the evening. I live on cards. I dine at four in the afternoon off roast mutton and rice pudding———"
"Good Lord, how tragic!"
"I go to bed at six and sleep till ten. Then I get up, take a cup of coffee and a biscuit, and come into the rooms with all my wits about me. Naturally, I stand a better chance than the men who've finished off a day of peg-drinking by a heavy indigestible dinner and half a dozen different wines."
The young man was amazed, interested, delighted with the absurdity of such an existence.
"As an amusement cards are good enough," said he; "or even at a pinch they might provide the means of livelihood. But why in the world a man of your position should make such sacrifices at their shrine———"
"My position," Garve broke in bitterly, "simply necessitates my spending more money than other men, without furnishing me the wherewithal to do it. I suppose it seems incredible to you Americans, that a man of old family, a man with a handle to his name, shouldn't possess a brass farthing to bless himself with?"
"Yet I understood from our friend Moses that you had town houses and country houses, manservants and maidservants, oxen and asses, not to mention spotted leopards and bloodstock over from England."
The impertinence of this speech was deprived of its sting by the friendly whimsicality of Underhill's manner. Garve accepted it in perfect good part.
