He set his foot on the bed and polished the toe of his shoe with the sheet. ‘No thank you,’ he said. ‘Your father may feel the calling to live in log cabins and eat buffalo meat and work the whole day through till the sweat pops off his brow, but that’s not for me. Maybe I lost fifty dollars last night betting on how many bald men would walk into the room, but last week I won seventy dollars betting on how many ladies at dinner would eat their asparagus with their fingers, and how many would not, for fear of lewdness. So it all evens itself out.’

‘I’m sorry for you,’ she said, quietly.

He finished his shoes and stood tall, tugging his vest straight. But then he saw that the look in her eyes was really sorrow after all, and he felt strangely unsettled.

‘You don’t have to feel sorry for me,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I’ve got everything I could possibly want.’

‘That’s exactly the trouble.’ She smiled. ‘When you’ve got everything, you’ve got everything to lose.’

‘May God preserve us from tub-thumping tarts,’ he said, trying to sound flippant. ‘I paid the extra dollar out of courtesy, not to hear an evangelical address.’

She sighed, shrugged, and picked up her reticule. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ she told him. ‘And anyway, it’s time for breakfast.’

Collis felt oddly disturbed, as if Kathleen Mary had intruded on the privacy of his life, as if she had walked into the closed house of his head, into the fug of cigar smoke and perfume and midnight gambling clubs, and opened up a dim high skylight.

He sucked hard at his cheroot. ‘I could give up gambling tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Give up drinking, give up going with whores. But where would that lead me? What would I do? I have a good education, I’ll grant you. But success depends on ambition, and opportunity. A few people are lucky enough to have both. But I don’t think I have either. I would rather pass my days amusing myself, and keeping out of mischief’s way, than by trying to tempt disaster by striking out into business. I’m not cut out for it. I’m a man who wagers on bald heads and asparagus, and cats and horses and ladies’ underwear besides, and nothing will change me.’

Kathleen Mary listened to these words and then gave Collis a faint smile. ‘That’s why I’m sorry for you, do you see?’

At that moment, there was the clatter of footsteps along the bare-board corridor outside, and someone hammered heavily on their door. ‘Who is it?’ cried Collis, without taking his cheroot out of his mouth or his hands out of his pockets.

‘You should know who it is!’ exclaimed a high, annoyed voice. ‘I should think you should damn well know!’