His society, moreover, was not devoid of interest. He had travelled so much, rubbed up against so many people, seen so many things. Having entered, at the age of fourteen, a big silk firm managed by one of his uncles, whose counting houses were to be found all over the world, he had been successively a sojourner in very varied latitudes, from Colombo to Boston, from Rio Janeiro to Yokohama. An intelligent observer, he owed to his wanderings and to his early contact with the different races of merchants, a dry and caustic turn of mind not unakin to my own. Thence sprang our speedy understanding, which resembled real harmony, without either of us feeling much liking or esteem for the other. As cynics we agreed in our scornful verdicts on others and on ourselves. I must say that he did not flatter himself that he was in any way an intellectual. Each time I sketched some generalisation, or laid the foundations of a system, he escaped me, sneering: "Oh, that's literature." Then, irritated, I inwardly dubbed him a "counter-jumper." "Have you been to see the Landrys off?" he asked abruptly. "Yes." "Shall you see them again in Paris?" "Before that perhaps. They expect to come back here." "I thought you were going to leave?" "I don't know now. That will depend!" He gave a little laugh which annoyed me. "Oh, so things are getting on?" "What's getting on?" "Your schemes." "What schemes?" "To do with the girl of course." I did not deign to seem vexed, and put on a joking tone. "My dear fellow, after all I've said to you on that subject!" "It's possible to change one's mind." "No. It would never even enter my head to change my mind about that." I summed up, in a few words, one of my favourite theses: marriage in our state of civilisation is an absurdity; it would be ridiculous to chain oneself for the rest of one's life to a woman--and such a woman, a girl, a creature still in germ, who had revealed nothing of her secret. It would certainly need an artlessness to which I was no longer susceptible, or a faculty for enthusiasm still more extinct in me. Each time a friend told me of his happy engagement I gazed at him in astonishment as at a being fallen from another planet. I concluded: "This little Landry girl is right enough to flirt with in the holidays! She's not displeasing or stupid, but I beg you to believe that there is nothing, and never will be anything between us...." Had I convinced him? He continued after a moment's silence. "They say ... she's well off!" "That doesn't tempt me either." He protested: "My dear chap, you're very much like the rest of the world!" I shrugged my shoulders and assured him that I was perfectly happy. "No ambitions?" "None." At his look of unbelief I set myself to sing the praises of the dilettante's life I was leading. Some question he asked led me to go into certain details to illustrate the way in which everything had always gone well with me.