“Oh, because it’s an extreme of one sort or another, and you are made for extremes. You’ll perhaps be very wicked first”—he smiled delightfully—“after which, of course, you’d have to be very good. It’s the way you’re made. I’m cut out on quite a different plan. I can’t be ‘very’ anything, unless it’s very drunk after the Oxford and Cambridge at Lord’s.” “Do you think I could be very wicked?” She asked the question with a thoughtfulness that amused him greatly, and he answered at once: “I haven’t a doubt of it. You are probably plotting the particular form of wickedness at this very moment.” She laughed, and he went on in the same serio-comic mood: “I quite envy you. It must be very thrilling to think to oneself, ‘I’ve dared to be desperately wicked.’ You cease to be a nonentity at once and become a force. You get right to hand-grips with the big elemental things. Of course that is interesting, but it usually means a confounded lot of bother.” “You are as bad as Hal Pritchard. She announced the other day she would rather have a dishonest purpose than no purpose at all.” “It’s the same idea, only Miss Pritchard lives up to her creed by being full of energy and purpose; whereas I can’t be anything but a mediocre waster. I’ve neither the pluck to be wicked, not the energy to be good, nor enough purpose to regret it. I believe I’m best described as an aristocratic ‘stiff’, a ‘stiff’ being a person who spends his life trying to avoid having to do things. “I fill a niche all the same,” he finished, “because I make such an excellent foil for the other chaps, who like to pride themselves on their superiority and hard work. It’s nice for them to be able to say contemptuously, ‘Look at Denton,’ and it’s nice for me to be able to feel I’m of some use, without the bother of making an effort.” “You are certainly quite incorrigible as an idler, if that can be called a purpose, and, Flip, don’t change; I love you for it; you are one of the most restful things I have ever known.” He glanced into her face with a keenness that somewhat belied his professed incapacity to be in earnest, and remarked with seeming lightness: “Feeling a bit down on your luck, eh? Are you thinking of falling in love foolishly?” “I’m thinking of trying to guard against doing so.” “You ought not to find it difficult. Crowd him out with other admirers.” “It seems as if he were going to do the crowding out.” “Why, is he so big?” jocularly. “There’s six foot five-and-a-half of him.” “Whew! And thin as a lathe, I suppose; a sort of animated telegraph pole.” “No; broad in proportion, cut to measure absolutely.” “Then he is a fine fellow,” with conviction. Lorraine felt a swift glow of pride, and then inwardly admonished herself for being silly. What, after all, was size? As Hal had trenchantly remarked, plenty of London policemen were just as big and fine. Half in self-defence she added: “He has brains as well, and he is as handsome as Apollo.”