"Is it mine?"
"Isn't it a little late in the day to drop it?" said Melville. "You've been put up for it now. Every one's at work. Miss Glendower———"
"I know," said Chatteris.
"Well?"
"I don't seem to want to go on."
"My dear man!"
"It's a bit of overwork perhaps. I'm off colour. Things have gone flat. That's why I'm up here."
He did a very absurd thing. He threw away a quarter-smoked cigarette and almost immediately demanded another.
"You've been a little immoderate with your statistics," said Melville.
Chatteris said something that struck Melville as having somehow been said before. "Election, progress, good of humanity, public spirit. None of these things interest me really," he said. "At least, not just now."
Melville waited.
"One gets brought up in an atmosphere in which it's always being whispered that one should go for a career. You learn it at your mother's knee. They never give you time to find out what you really want, they keep on shoving you at that. They form your character. They rule your mind. They rush you into it."
"They didn't rush me," said Melville.
"They rushed me, anyhow. And here I am!"
"You don't want a career?"
"Well— Look what it is."
414
