chuckled boastfully over "the usual sort of escapade," and said he'd "be glad to get the rascal home—back in sober old England"—"no harm done"—"devil of a good time, no doubt; hadn't got a yen, and only had his allowance eight days ago, a quarterly allowance, and the Lord Harry only knows how much he's bled his mother!" "But, after all"—and then he delivered himself of the amazing originality that "Boys will be boys!"
If there are many men who like to be virtuous vicariously, there are a few, even odder specimens of our wonderfully variegated humanity, who like to sin—in one direction—by proxy. Robert Gregory, in the big thing of life, was an exemplary husband. If Florence Gregory dwelt but in the suburbs of his good pleasure, he lived—in the one sense—on an island on to which no other woman ever put her foot. The Gregory Steamship Company was his adored mistress and his wedded wife. But Florence came next nearest to his warmth—and she had no human rival, never had had or would have one. She knew this. Even a much duller woman must have known it. And perhaps it had enabled her to hold up her head and go smiling through some hard years of disillusion and chagrin.
But Robert Gregory had a very soft spot in his stupid heart for his boy's gallantries. Secretly he was not a little proud of them—of course, they mustn't go too far or cost too much—and of this last escapade he almost boasted as he smoked his after-tiffin cigar—boasted with an unctuous hint of reminiscent glee that insinuated—and was meant to—that he'd been a bit gay "in the same old way" in his younger days.
Which most emphatically he had not.
