When the ladies had retired, the gentlemen drew chairs to the fire to smoke.
The cosmopolitan and the fair-haired good-looking Saxon sat as at dinner. The former pulled out a case, and offered a cigar to the Saxon.
'Thank you,' said the latter; 'I do not smoke.'
'Ah, my dear sir, if you had cooled your heels on as many capitals and glaciers and deserts and decks of vessels as I, you would not despise the weed. You are a new arrival here?'
'Perhaps you are a friend of the beautiful Miss Gordon?'
'Ah, Shakespeare's town! I've been there. Shakespeare was no end of a poet; but it was a cursedly dull place to be born in. I daresay he ran away from the dulness of it. Do you find it dull?'
'Well, I--I have had very little experience of anywhere else. I have lived in it all my life.'
'Yes; but you've run about now and then? You've paddled through the mud of other places, and had your chance of frost-bite or sunstroke in other latitudes?'
'You have been about a good deal?' said he.
'The strangest of all is now here. You will scarcely believe me when I say I am eight-and-twenty years of age, and I have never been fifty miles from my native town in all my life until now.'
'God bless my soul!' The traveller sprang to his feet. 'God bless my soul! Sir, let us shake hands. We must be friends. My name is William Nevill. What is yours?'
'My dear Osborne, this is the happiest moment of my life. Some Roman swell once offered a beautiful bound edition of the poets to anyone who would invent a new pleasure. By living your twenty-eight years within your fifty-mile radius, and then meeting me, you have invented a new pleasure with a vengeance. How do you feel?'
'I am astonished at that. How a fellow can feel well who has been all his life tethered with a fifty-mile rope to the family house-tree, I cannot understand. Bless my soul! I am glad to meet you. Sit down, and let us have a chat. Just fancy: I, who have been everywhere, meeting you, who have been nowhere, and meeting you just as you have broken cover for the first time! Well, they say extremes meet. To think a rolling-stone like me, and a stick-in-the-mud like you, should meet, is most wonderful. Never fifty miles from home! How do you feel, man?'