He had truly learned to
love it.
Yet now, as he strolled on the terrace with his first
after-luncheon cigar, he unaccountably yawned at the thing
he loved. Upon reflection, he had gone to bed rather
earlier the previous evening than usual. He had not been
drinking out of the ordinary; his liver seemed right enough.
He was not conscious of being either tired or drowsy.
He looked again at the view with some fixity, and said
to himself convincingly that nothing else in England
could compare with it. It was the finest thing there
was anywhere. Then he surprised himself in the middle
of another yawn--and halted abruptly. It occurred to him
that he wanted to travel.
Since his home-coming to this splendid new home in the
previous January, at the conclusion of a honeymoon spent
in Algiers and Egypt, he had not been out of England.
There had been a considerable sojourn in London, it is true,
at what was described to him as the height of the Season,
but looking back upon it, he could not think of it
as a diversion. It had been a restless, over-worked,
mystifying experience, full of dinners to people whom he
had never seen before, and laborious encounters with other
people whom he did not particularly want to see again.
There had been no physical comfort in it for him,
and little more mental satisfaction, for Londoners,
or rather people in London, seemed all to be making
an invidious distinction in their minds between him
and his wife.
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