No More Learning

It makes him feel important and business-like,
and blase, and cynical; and whenever he has a touch of liver, or suffers
from want of exercise, he can mourn over his lost love, and be very
happy in a tender, twilight fashion.

Hannasyde's affair of the heart had been a Godsend to him. It was four
years old, and the girl had long since given up thinking of it.

She had married and had many cares of her own. In the beginning, she
had told Hannasyde that, "while she could never be anything more than
a sister to him, she would always take the deepest interest in his
welfare. " This startlingly new and original remark gave Hannasyde
something to think over for two years; and his own vanity filled in
the other twenty-four months. Hannasyde was quite different from Phil
Garron, but, none the less, had several points in common with that far
too lucky man.

He kept his unrequited attachment by him as men keep a well-smoked
pipe--for comfort's sake, and because it had grown dear in the using. It
brought him happily through the Simla season. Hannasyde was not lovely.
There was a crudity in his manners, and a roughness in the way in which
he helped a lady on to her horse, that did not attract the other sex
to him. Even if he had cast about for their favor, which he did not. He
kept his wounded heart all to himself for a while.

Then trouble came to him. All who go to Simla, know the slope from the
Telegraph to the Public Works Office.
Hannasyde was loafing up the hill,
one September morning between calling hours, when a 'rickshaw came down
in a hurry, and in the 'rickshaw sat the living, breathing image of the
girl who had made him so happily unhappy.

Hannasyde leaned against the railing and gasped. He wanted to run
downhill after the 'rickshaw, but that was impossible; so he went
forward with most of his blood in his temples. It was impossible, for
many reasons, that the woman in the 'rickshaw could be the girl he had
known. She was, he discovered later, the wife of a man from Dindigul, or
Coimbatore, or some out-of-the-way place, and she had come up to Simla
early in the season for the good of her health.

She was going back to Dindigul, or wherever it was, at the end of the
season; and in all likelihood would never return to Simla again, her
proper Hill-station being Ootacamund. That night, Hannasyde, raw and
savage from the raking up of all old feelings, took counsel with himself
for one measured hour. What he decided upon was this; and you must
decide for yourself how much genuine affection for the old love, and how
much a very natural inclination to go abroad and enjoy himself, affected
the decision. Mrs. Landys-Haggert would never in all human likelihood
cross his path again. So whatever he did didn't much matter. She was
marvellously like the girl who "took a deep interest" and the rest of
the formula. All things considered, it would be pleasant to make the
acquaintance of Mrs. Landys-Haggert, and for a little time--only a very
little time--to make believe that he was with Alice Chisane again. Every
one is more or less mad on one point. Hannasyde's particular monomania
was his old love, Alice Chisane.