'It does. It bores him to hear about it. It doesn't amuse him; he doesn't think it's funny--and it's not particularly--and w-what's the good of making bores of ourselves?' Betty regarded him thoughtfully. 'I don't think he's so easily bored as all that, you know.' Tommy remained gloomy. A curious element had come, just of late, into his relations with Venables--the element of embarrassment. How it began he could not have said, nor whence it sprang. It was unfortunate, as they saw so extremely much of Venables. More and more Tommy left him to Betty, refusing to make a third in their expeditions and amusements. Yet he liked Venables; he liked him as much as he had liked him at first, when the meeting face to face had carried him back curiously to the old days of school hero-worship. Now, for the last few weeks, he had become growingly silent in his presence; the difficulty of conversation made him rather angry; it was a difficulty he was unused to, and he could not account for it. It oppressed him, too, now, in Miss Varley's presence; the achievement of intimacy did not progress. Tommy supposed it might have something to do with Lent; Lent often affected one's spirits unfavourably. Life in general, in fact, was rather a bore. Tommy told Betty so. 'I'm tired of being overworked,' he remarked. 'I wish I wasn't a newspaper man. I wish I wrote novels, like Mrs. Venables. Let's write a novel, Betty. I wish I had a motor-car to play with, like Venables. I wish we were older, Betty--old enough to go home to Santa Caterina and live in peace on our hard-won earnings. Let's chuck it and go. We've got enough, if we leave our debts behind us, and eat like moderate Christians, and are out of reach of shops. What's the good of fooling here, and never having enough to live on, and--and----' His stammer or his disgust choked the rest of his grievances from his lips. Betty looked sympathetic. 'You'll feel better in the morning,' she said, 'if it's a fine day.' She was standing by the open window, leaning out into the soft darkness. From the narrow steep alley below, and from the wide lit thoroughfare into which it ran, the cheerful revel of Naples at night hummed up. 'Let's come out,' said Betty, 'into the streets.' And the two seekers after a quiet life strolled through the city together. They returned home a little after midnight, having made a very heroic and quite successful fight against care. CHAPTER VII RETROSPECT WITH THE SEARCH-LIGHT 'D'autres jours ouvriront les portes, La forêt garde les verrous, La forêt brûle autour de nous, C'est la clarté des feuilles mortes, Qui brûlent sur le seuil des portes....' MAETERLINCK. At the end of the first week in March the Venables went to Sicily; they would stay there, probably, for the rest of the month. 'So for three weeks we shan't have a chance of eating too much at lunch,' Tommy remarked, on the evening after they had gone. 'Pity, isn't it? I loved those lunches.'