The Major did not go into any business. Opportunities to go into this or that were in due season presented to him. He listened with his air of congealed courtesy, but declined them all, explaining that his present investments were entirely satisfactory and yielded him a satisfactory income. Like many men of his breed and generation, he liked a good horse so well that it was more than a liking--with him it was a love. Afternoons he frequently drove one: a ramping bay mare with a fractious temper and a set of gifted heels. He was fond of cards, and in the evenings generally played cards with certain of his fellow club members in a private room at the Kenilworth Club. These men, though, never became his friends, but were merely the men with whom he played cards. If of a morning after breakfast he went for a walk, as sometimes happened, he went alone, except on those infrequent occasions when Judge Sherwan accompanied him. At the beginning he was asked to affairs at the homes of influential people; but, since he never accepted these invitations--any of them--people presently quit asking him. Among a hundred thousand human beings he became, or rather he remained, so far as interchange of thought, or of affection, or of confidence, or of intimacy was concerned, a social Crusoe upon a desert island set in an empty sea, with no Man Friday to bear him company in his loneliness--unless it might be said that old Sherwan qualified, after a fashion, for the Man-Friday job. You see, the Major knew all along that--sooner or later--the woman would be coming. For these few months he had played the truant from his destiny, or his Nemesis, or his fate, or by whatever fancy name you might choose to call it; but there was no chance of his having escaped it altogether. Through strength of will power he could in silence continue to endure it as he had in silence endured it through the years that stretched-backward between young-manhood and middle age. Through pride he would involve no other person, however remotely, in the sorry web of his own weaving. Mentally he manoeuvred to stand apart from his kind; to render himself as inaccessible, as aloof, as unknowable by them as the core of an iceberg. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that the channels of his outer life, no matter how narrowly they ran or how coldly they coursed, would be disturbed and set awry by her coming. A cultivated and well-sustained indifference to popular opinion is all well enough, but gossip is a corrosive that eats through the calluses until it finds quick flesh underneath. The Major might arm himself against showing what he felt, but he could not armour himself against feeling what he felt. He knew it--and she knew it. Perhaps that was why she, this one time, delayed her coming until he had ample opportunity for becoming, in a measure, fixed in the community and identified with it.