My two other colleagues were going, one to spend a holiday at
Brighton--which he said was very bracing at Easter, adding that he
expected to fall in with some fellows he knew. They will all stroll on
the Parade, smoke cigarettes together, and adjourn for a game of
billiards. No doubt a very harmless way of passing the time, but not to
me enlivening. But Walters is a conventional person, and, as long as he
is doing what he would call "the correct thing," he is perfectly and
serenely content. The sixth and last is going to Surbiton to spend the
holidays with a mother and three sisters, and I think he is the most
virtuously employed of all. He will walk out alone, with a terrier dog,
before lunch; and after lunch he will go out with his sisters; and
perhaps the vicar will come to tea. But then it will be home, and the
girls will be proud of their brother, and will have the dishes he
likes, and he will have his father's old study to smoke in. I am not
sure that he is not the happiest of all, because he is not only
pursuing his own happiness.
But I have no such duties before me. I might, I suppose, go down to my
sister Helen at the Somersetshire vicarage where she lives so full a
life. But the house is small, there are four children, and not much
money, and I should only be in the way. Charles would do his best to
welcome me, but he will be in a great fuss over his Easter services;
and he will ask me to use his study as though it was my own room, which
will necessitate a number of hurried interviews in the drawing-room, my
sister will take her letters up to her bedroom, and the doors will have
to be carefully closed to exclude my tobacco smoke.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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