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father’s business. He had made up his mind to get as much
fun as possible into the time, and demanded variety rather
than duration in his love affairs.
‘I don’t know how you get hold of them,’ said Lawson fu-
riously.
‘There’s no difficulty about that, sonny,’ answered Flana-
gan. ‘You just go right in. The difficulty is to get rid of them.
That’s where you want tact.’
Philip was too much occupied with his work, the books
he was reading, the plays he saw, the conversation he lis-
tened to, to trouble himself with the desire for female
society. He thought there would be plenty of time for that
when he could speak French more glibly.
It was more than a year now since he had seen Miss
Wilkinson, and during his first weeks in Paris he had been
too busy to answer a letter she had written to him just before
he left Blackstable. When another came, knowing it would
be full of reproaches and not being just then in the mood for
them, he put it aside, intending to open it later; but he for-
got and did not run across it till a month afterwards, when
he was turning out a drawer to find some socks that had
no holes in them. He looked at the unopened letter with
dismay. He was afraid that Miss Wilkinson had suffered a
good deal, and it made him feel a brute; but she had prob-
ably got over the suffering by now, at all events the worst of
it. It suggested itself to him that women were often very em-
phatic in their expressions. These did not mean so much as
when men used them. He had quite made up his mind that
nothing would induce him ever to see her again. He had

0 Of Human Bondage