Mr. Prodmore’s blandness confessed, by its instant increase, to this impeachment. There was always the glory of intimacy in Yule’s knowing what he thought. “I hold that you keep, in public, very dangerous company; but I also hold that you’re extravagant mainly because you’ve nothing at stake. A man has the right opinions,” he developed with pleasant confidence, “as soon as he has something to lose by having the wrong. Haven’t I already hinted to you how to set your political house in order? You drop into the lower regions because you keep the best rooms empty. You’re a firebrand, in other words my dear Captain, simply because you’re a bachelor. That’s one of the early complaints we all pass through, but it’s soon over, and the treatment for it quite simple. I have your remedy.” The young man’s eyes, wandering again about the house, might have been those of an auditor of the fiddling before the rise of the curtain. “A remedy worse than the disease?” “There’s nothing worse, that I’ve ever heard of,” Mr. Prodmore sharply replied, “than your particular fix. Least of all a heap of gold----” “A heap of gold?” His visitor idly settled, as if the curtain were going up. Mr. Prodmore raised it bravely. “In the lap of a fine fresh lass! Give pledges to fortune, as somebody says--_then_ we’ll talk. You want money--that’s what you want. Well, marry it!” Clement Yule, for a little, never stirred, save that his eyes yet again strayed vaguely. At last they stopped with a smile. “Of course I could do that in a moment!” “It’s even just my own danger from you,” his companion returned. “I perfectly recognise that any woman would now jump----” “I don’t like jumping women,” Captain Yule threw in; “but that perhaps is a detail. It’s more to the point that I’ve yet to see the woman whom, by an advance of my own----” “You’d care to keep in the really attractive position----?” “Which can never, of course, be anything”--Yule took his friend up again--“but that of waiting quietly.” “Never, never anything!” Mr. Prodmore, most assentingly, banished all other thought. “But I haven’t asked you, you know, to make an advance.” “You’ve only asked me to receive one?” Mr. Prodmore waited a little. “Well, I’ve asked you--I asked you a month ago--to think it all over.” “I _have_ thought it all over,” Clement Yule said; “and the strange sequel seems to be that my eyes have got accustomed to my darkness. I seem to make out, in the gloom of my meditations, that, at the worst, I can let the whole thing slide.” “The property?”--Mr. Prodmore jerked back as if it were about to start. “Isn’t it the property,” his visitor inquired, “that positively throws me up? If I can afford neither to live on it nor to disencumber it, I can at least let it save its own bacon and pay its own debts. I can say to you simply: ‘Take it, my dear sir, and the devil take _you_!’” Mr. Prodmore gave a quick, strained smile. “You wouldn’t be so shockingly rude!”