“I am talking, Sir Guy. But, Joan,” continued Mr. Maturin, “they insisted that I could cure you of your attachment to me, if I wished. I pointed out that I had already put myself before you as a man whose character contained certain grave flaws; and that you had, while deploring my recent and second bankruptcy and my only too frequent lapses from the strictly moral code, chosen to believe that there is still some good in me, and had therefore remained by your decision to become my wife. Your mother and grandfather, however, have dared me to tell you the complete truth about myself and yet hold you. Joan, did I think for one moment that I would lose you in this way, I frankly admit,” said Mr. Maturin emphatically, “that I would not put my hand to any such quixotic folly----” “After all,” said Joan de Gramercy, “the past is dead.” “My point exactly, child. And that is why,” said Mr. Maturin, “if only to satisfy your mother and grandfather of the inevitability of your choice and of my complete faith in your love, I have decided to do what I will do. Listen, Joan----” It was Sir Guy’s stern voice that fell on the room like an axe. “You live up to my description of you completely, Mr. Maturin. You are indeed the ace of cads! For now you are betraying your word of a few minutes ago.” “I do wish you wouldn’t interrupt,” said Mr. Maturin warmly. “I am embarked, let’s face it, on a suspension-bridge of very doubtful strength and you keep on trying to upset my balance with sweeping comments on my character. My tale, Joan,” he continued into the middle air, and spoke from this moment on with his eyes fixed absently in the shadows of the books on the shelves opposite, “my tale has to do with many years ago. Now I have been and I have done many things in my time; and have become one of those men of whom it is vaguely said, ‘He could write a book about his life,’ which of course means that I have done everything in my life except write a book. At the time I speak of I was a subaltern in a Guards regiment; a mode of life which, it may distress you to hear, Sir Guy, bored me in the extreme. As, however, the small allowance my father gave me was contingent on my retaining my commission, and as even the smallest allowance is better than a poke in the eye, I endured in patience the while I gave myself up to the pleasures of the town. You must not for a moment think,” protested Mr. Maturin with feeling, “that I am trying to belittle the gentlemen of the Brigade, for better men than I have tried and failed at that game: nor that I am a slave to malice, for as you know I was later expelled from their company: but truth compels me to confess that my companions of those days were notable rather for the correctness of their appearance than for their learning, while their charm was of that static, profound sort which no one could call ingratiating and a certain kind of primitive _badinage_ was held among them to be the superior of wit. And