"Just stand still, and let them throw themselves against you, Cromlech. Roger!--Oh, he's gone to bed; stupid thing to do--that! Cromlech, old chap, I'm enjoying myself immensely." He just touched his old friend's shoulder as he passed by: the caress was almost imperceptible. Stabb turned his broad red face round to him and laughed ponderously. "Oh, and you understand!" cried Lynborough. "I have never myself objected to a bit of fun with the girls," said Stabb. Lynborough sank into a chair murmuring delightedly, "You're priceless, Cromlech!" _Chapter Six_ EXERCISE BEFORE BREAKFAST "Life--" (The extract is from Lynborough's diary, dated this same 14th of June)--"may be considered as a process (Cromlech's view, conducting to the tomb)--a program (as, I am persuaded, Roger conceives it, marking off each stage thereof with a duly guaranteed stamp of performance)--or as a progress--in which light I myself prefer to envisage it. Process--program--progress; the words, with my above-avowed preference, sound unimpeachably orthodox. Once I had a Bishop ancestor. He crops out. "Yet I don't mean what he does. I don't believe in growing better in the common sense--that is, in an increasing power to resist what tempts you, to refrain from doing what you want. That ideal seems to me, more and more, to start from the wrong end. No man refrains from doing what he wants to do. In the end the contradiction--the illogicality--is complete. You learn to want more wisely--that's all. Train desire, for you can never chain it. "I'm engaged here and now on what is to all appearance the most trivial of businesses. I play the spiteful boy--she is an obstinate peevish girl. There are other girls too--one an insinuating tiny minx, who would wheedle a backward glance out of Simon Stylites as he remounted his pillar--and, by the sun in heaven, will get little more from this child of Mother Earth! There's another, I hear--Irish!--And Irish is near my heart. But behind her--set in the uncertain radiance of my imagination--lies her Excellency. Heaven knows why! Save that it is gloriously paradoxical to meet a foreign Excellency in this spot, and to get to most justifiable, most delightful, loggerheads with her immediately. I have conceived Machiavellian devices. I will lure away her friends. I will isolate her, humiliate her, beat her in the fight. There may be some black eyes--some bruised hearts--but I shall do it. Why? I have always been gentle before. But so I feel toward her. And therefore I am afraid. This is the foeman for my steel, I think--I have my doubts but that she'll beat me in the end.