“He, too, needs development,” Fortinbras went on. “Or rather, not so much development as a collection of soul-material from which development may proceed. Your one accomplishment, I understand, is riding a bicycle. Let us take that as the germ from which the tree of happiness may spring. Do you bicycle, Corinna?” “I can, of course. But I hate it.” “You don’t,” replied Fortinbras quickly. “You hate your own idea of it. You’ll begin your course of happiness by sweeping away all your ideas concerning bicycling and coming to bicycling itself.” “I never heard anything so idiotic,” declared Corinna. “Doubtless,” smiled Fortinbras. “You haven’t heard everything. Go on your knees and thank God for it. I repeat—or amplify my prescription. Go forth both of you on bicycles into the wide world. They will not be Wheels of Chance, but Wheels of Destiny. Go through the broad land of France filling your souls with sunshine and freedom and your throats with salutary and thirst-provoking dust. Have no care for the morrow and look at the future through the golden haze of eventide.” “There’s nothing I should like better,” said Martin, with a glance at Corinna, “but I can’t afford it. I must get back to London to look out for an engagement.” Fortinbras mopped his brow with an over-fatigued pocket-handkerchief. “What did you pay me five francs for? For the pleasure of hearing me talk, or for the value of my counsel?” “I must look at things practically,” said Martin. “But, good God!” cried Fortinbras, with soft uplifted hands, “what is there more practical, more commonplace, less romantic in the world than riding a bicycle? You want to emerge from your Slough of Despond, don’t you?” “Of course,” said Martin. “Then I say—get on a bicycle and ride out of it. Practical to the point of pathos.” Martin objected: “No one will pay me for careering through France on a bicycle. I’ve got to live, and for the matter of fact, so has Corinna.” “But, my dear young friend, she has twenty pounds. You, on your own showing have forty. Sixty pounds between you. A fortune! You both are tormented by the idea of what will happen when the Pactolus runs dry. Banish that pestilential miasma from your minds. Go on the adventure.”