“My dear Frank, I am afraid that question is likely to bring on a long discussion; but in consideration of the day, and the more especially as I see you do not mean to let me read, I will put away my books for the afternoon.” “There’s a good fellow,” Frank said, brightening up greatly, and wheeling the fellow arm-chair of the one he had been sitting in, up to the fire, while Prescott put his books back into their places on the shelves. That done, he opened a bottle of beer, poured it into a large tankard—a college trophy of his prowess in boating—and lit his pipe. “There, that’s comfortable,” Frank said. “The climate has its advantages after all. Now let us talk seriously. What in the world am I to do? Here have I been back in England little more than three months, two of which I have spent shooting, and now after a month in London, I am bored out of my life.” “It is a hard case, Frank; a man with eight hundred a year, and nothing to do but to spend it; and you are out nearly every evening, too.” “That’s all well enough for the evening, Prescott, but I can’t spend the day thinking whom I am going to meet in the evening; and whether the pretty girl I danced with the night before will be there, and so on.” “Why not join a club, Frank?” “I am down for the ‘Travellers,’ but it may be years before I am elected, and I don’t believe I shall care for it when I am. I have been into several clubs with men I know, and they seem to me the slowest places going. Men look in, and moon about the room, and take up a paper, and then throw it down again, and go and look out of the window, and then order their dinner, and grumble over it when they have got it. My dear fellow, it’s well enough for old fogies, but I can see no pull in it at all. Of course, in the evening one can play billiards, but as I am out nearly every night, I don’t see that I shall gain much by that.” “Why don’t you keep a horse, Frank?” “Well, I might do that, Prescott; but I don’t think I should ever go out on the beggar if I had one. I don’t care much for riding at the best of times; and as to going up and down Rotten Row, it would drive me out of my mind in a week. No; when summer comes I shall buy a yacht of about twenty tons, and cruise about; but the question is the winter.” “Well, Frank, as you do not care, I have heard you say, for country sports, I really think it would be worth your while to think seriously of entering yourself at the bar, or of taking to literary work; or in fact making some sort of aim for yourself. I confess that, as a busy man myself, I can hardly conceive a man having the whole day on his hands, with nothing definite before him.”