It was to Bob that Conroy confided the fact that he was tired of the life of a leader of English society. The two men were sitting together in the smoking room at one o'clock in the morning after one of Conroy's most magnificent entertainments.
"I'm damned well sick of all this," said Conroy suddenly.
Bob Power was a man of adventurous disposition. He had a reputation in Connacht as a singularly bold rider to hounds. The story of his singlehanded cruise round Ireland in a ten tonner will be told among yachtsmen until his son does something more extravagantly idiotic. The London season always bored him. The atmosphere of Conroy's house in Park Lane stifled him.
"Is there any one thing left in this rotten old world," said Conroy, "that's worth doing?"
In Bob's opinion there were several things very well worth doing. He suggested one of them at once.
"Let's get out the _Finola_," he said, "and go for a cruise. We've never done the South Sea Islands."
The _Finola_ was the largest of Conroy's yachts, a handsome vessel of something over a thousand tons.
"Cruising in the _Finola_," said Conroy, "is no earthly good to me. What I want is something that will put me into a nervous sweat, the same as I was when I was up against Ikenstein and the railway bosses. My nerves were like damned fiddle strings for a fortnight when I didn't know whether I was going to come out a pauper or the owner of the biggest pile mortal man ever handled."
Bob knew nothing of Ikenstein or the methods by which the pile had been wrested from him and his companions, but he did know the sensations which Conroy described. He, himself, arrived at them by hanging on to a sea anchor in a gale of wind off the Galway coast, or pushing a vicious horse at a nasty jump. Nervous sweat, stretched nerves and complete uncertainty about the immediate future afford the same delight however you get at them. He sympathized with Conroy.
"You might fit out a ship or two and try exploring round the South Pole," Bob said. "They've got the thing itself of course, but there must be lots of places still undiscovered in the neighbourhood. I should think that hummocking along over the ice floes in a dog sledge must be pretty thrilling."