Chapter IV: Ferment

The sands of the season were running out, but Matthew Strang sifted them for every grain of the gold of meetings with Eleanor Wyndwood. He was shy of formal visits to the house, he did not venture on the conventional course of asking her to sit to him, for he would not consciously feed the flame of a passion that must be hopeless. But with that curious illogicality which distinguishes man from the brute, he called in accident to arrange their rendezvous, pursuing possibility with a perseverance that made it probability.

He could not follow Eleanor to all her fashionable fastnesses as easily as to the shrines of spirituality, for to be born well is still a necessity of life in some circles; but they met often enough amid the monotonous glitter which was the woman’s birthright and second nature to the man. His eye perpetually sought her; in chattering drawing-rooms, in cool gardens, on congested staircases, in whirling ballrooms; finding every place dark and empty till she filled and illumined the scene. She gleamed upon him as unreal and insubstantial as the figures he had once noted in one of these ballrooms, completely girdled by electric lights, which, robbing the dancers of shadows, made them fairy-like and phantasmal. But he did not follow out the analogy or suspect it might be his own love which was surrounding her with this spiritualizing electric illumination. Each time he saw her he resolved never to see her again. He could never tell her what was in his heart, never insult her exquisite purity with the avowal of his love, even though that love were clarified to unimagined ethereality by her stainless radiance of soul. And each time the possibility of seeing her drew nigh again, he told himself that he needed her for his Art--that she was drawing him up from the slough of banality, that now for the first time his soul was really opening out to the appeal of the higher beauty. Not that he had as yet begun to express the higher beauty; he had simply abandoned the old. He was too restless to work, to concentrate himself; he flitted between the unfinished and the projected, painting in and painting out; he took long rides in the middle of the day, to the amazement of his faithful body-servant; he read emotional literature. Once an unconscious hostess gave him Eleanor’s company at dinner. Mrs. Wyndwood was in stately black, with a bunch of violets at her bosom. It was an enchanted meal. They talked of poetry, and he seemed to be dining off poetry too. The wines where special brands of nectar, laid down by the gods in the golden age, the meats were ambrosia, the sweets honey-dew. A beauty as of Hebe transfigured the faces of the neat-handed waiting-men. It seemed only natural that the beautiful stately creature at his side should overflow with quotations from religious poetry--was she not herself a religious poem? His recent feverish readings had branded lines on his own heart; he was able to answer her in lyric antiphony. His other neighbor he simply forgot, though she was a bishop’s consort and a patroness of the arts, with printed views on the genuineness of Old Masters. There was an old picture of his own on the opposite wall, and the fear lest Eleanor should raise her eyes to it was all the serpent in his Paradise. His subconsciousness noted with pleasure, however, that the painting had mellowed--a proof that his theory of colors was right.

He watched with furtive fascination the play of Eleanor’s beautiful Botticelli hands, plying her knife and fork, as she explained how under the influence of Dolkovitch she had drifted away from Socialism, whose professors always laid too much stress on the needs of the body. But she apologized for having spoken rudely of his “Triumph of Bacchus” from a mere knowledge of its title; he had made her understand now that the appeal of painting must always be sensuous, and that subject was only an excuse for draughtsmanship and coloring, and she startled him by saying she liked that picture of his on the opposite wall, which he had been hoping had escaped her eye. It became at once glorified to his own.

After the ladies had retired, the gentlemen talked about a newly invented torpedo, the finances of India, and the prospects of the Conservatives; the conversation sounded almost indecent, and he was glad Eleanor was not there to hear it. He took no part in the fatuous discussion, contenting himself with watching Eleanor’s face amid the wreaths of his cigar-smoke; even in the flesh the face had for him something of this vaporous, elusive incorporeality.

In the drawing-room the inevitable Miss Regan claimed his attention. Eleanor was playing Mendelssohn, and he would have liked to listen, but Olive was less original.

“You have never honored our five-o’clocks again,” she said, reproachfully.

He murmured that he was busy.

“That was the charm of your coming,” she reminded him. “One had the sensation of beguiling you to play truant. But I suppose the tea was bad. Nor _would_ make it.”

“The tea was beautiful,” he said, smiling. “But aren’t we disturbing the music?”

“On the contrary. Nor is giving us ‘Lieder ohne Wörte,’ and we have to supply the words. I wonder what makes her play such old-fashioned school-girl things. Then it must have been the scones.”

He shook his head and pursed his lips, and the music flowed on like a lovely moonlit stream. He was drifting on the stream with Eleanor, as, in those far-off days of young romance, he had dreamed of lovers drifting. A mystic silver haze was shed from the moon that sailed softly through the lambent starry sky, the whisper of the wind among the trees and the quiet lapping of the water made a dulcet stillness that was punctuated by the passionate “jug-jug” of the nightingale; mysterious palaces of night glided along the banks behind dim gardens wafting drowsy odors. The thought shook him that the world held such lovers--lovers who were not brought together for a moment and hurled apart in the accidental whirl of society atoms, lovers whose lips were not eternally sundered, but lovers who were each other’s sunshine and moonlight and music, daily, nightly, perennially. He alone was doomed to eternal loneliness--nay, to that aggravated form of loneliness which is shared with a life-long partner.

“I came across your cynical friend the other day.”

He started, becoming conscious that his eyes were full of sweet, hopeless tears.

“Indeed,” he murmured automatically.

“Yes, the cousin you told me of.”

“Did I tell you of him?”

“Don’t you remember you told me he said all women are in the same trade? Well, he is veritably a cynic of cynics, for he candidly informed me, after I had been bantering and mystifying him with my foreknowledge of him, that he had simply quoted Schopenhauer.”

“Where did you meet him?” he asked, a little interested.

“At the Dudley-Heatons’s reception a fortnight ago. I call him the Minister of the Interior, he’s such an epicure--the politician, I mean, not your cousin. There was Lord Fashborough there, the man who’s just been appointed president of the Cruelty to Children Commission, and who glittered with stars and orders like a comic-opera Begum. He it was introduced your cousin--at my request, of course. Your cousin told me the Begum and he had travelled together in Spain, when the Begum’s appetite for bull-fights and cock-fights was insatiable. I have never been in Spain, and two of my favorite illusions were destroyed at one fell blow. It seems that they simply push reluctant, decrepit old horses on to the horns of the bulls. And then the Spanish women! Your cousin describes them as ugly and unwashed.”

He shuddered. Why would Miss Regan perversely obtrude the prose of life upon his consciousness? He would not answer her--he tried to drift again with the magic stream, but the spell was broken. He knew it was Eleanor’s music that made the pictures, and that the odors came from the flowers at Olive’s throat.

“He is painting Nor’s portrait,” she went on, indifferently.

He had to answer her now--in a stifled interrogative, masking a sudden sharp agony and foreboding.

“What, Herbert?”

“Yes; he asked her to give him some sittings. He hasn’t altogether become a critic, you see.”

“Who introduced him to her?”

“I did, of course.”

“But his request was rather hasty, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, it wasn’t the first time. We met him again at the Russian Embassy.”

“And how does Mrs. Wyndwood know he can paint?”

Olive laughed quietly. “Oh, he said so. He usually tells the truth, I fancy. But he _is_ an artist, isn’t he?”

“He was a Gold Medallist of the Royal Academy,” he answered, with unaccustomed bitterness. A mad envy was consuming him. Why had he not asked Mrs. Wyndwood to sit to him, seeing that her consent was so facile? Was he always to stand by while the best of life was seized and carried off by the bolder, the more reckless, nay, by the more unworthy? The remembrance that Herbert had the right, and he had not, did not dilute his bitterness, though it brought a hot flush to his cheek. Who was he to see profanation in the juxtaposition of Eleanor with a man like Herbert? However ignoble Herbert’s conception of womanhood, had not he himself always found him lovable?

“Aren’t you friends?” Olive asked, divining alienation in his tone.

He felt remorseful. “Oh, we are great friends,” he answered, with cordial warmth. “He was very kind to me when I first came to London.”

“He asked me to sit as well,” Olive pursued, satisfied.

Matthew Strang felt the tension in his brain relax.

“And are you going to?”

“No. I hate flattery. So I sacrificed Nor instead. Of course I shall go and sit by her, though not with her. Curious, the subtleties of language.”

“Then you will still chaperon her,” he said, with a joyous smile.

“I never neglect a pleasant duty,” she answered, placidly. “But we can only give him a few sittings.”

“Ah!” he interrupted, with an involuntary exclamation of relief.

“We’re leaving town.”

He looked blank now. “Are you, indeed?”

“Of course. Why are you surprised? Didn’t you think we were proper? Nor wanted the eternal Homburg or Switzerland, but I’m resolved to show her England. Like most travelled cockneys, she thinks England’s the capital of London, and I want to teach her geography, so we’re off to Devonshire.”

“She will enjoy Devonshire scenery.”

“Yes, especially the Creamery. That’s what I’ve christened the little God-forsaken village I discovered. So you know, if you ever want a cup of tea, we shall have five-o’clocks going on there also. Patronize the Creamery.”

“I will,” he said, with an instant resolution to take tea both in Mayfair and in Devonshire.

“That’s right. We’ll send a coach-and-four to meet you. At least, you’ll find it waiting at the station for passengers. Do you know whom I should like to meet most of all men living?”

“Wagner? The Pope? The Czar?”

“Don’t be absurd. The Rev. Septimus Wheercastle. A local guide-book says, ‘The Rev. Septimus Wheercastle speaks in very favorable terms of the Undercliff.’ Isn’t it delicious? Imagine a gentleman in a white tie patronizing an Undercliff! But, then, the clergy are always patronizing the Almighty, so why not His works?”

“Hush,” he said, indicating the proximity of the Bishop.

“Isn’t he beautiful?” she asked, in an awed whisper. “What a privilege never to be mistaken for a waiter! I am so proud of the bishops in my family. We have a pair, with gaiters to match, both High Church atheists; they are the joys of my life, they and the dowager duchess, who wears kiss-curls and raves for blood. ‘Give me blood!’ she cries, as she denounces modern society, stabbing her potato with her fork _à la_ Sarah Siddons.”

To Matthew Strang, who still had a vague reverence for duchesses, it was troubling to see them through the eyes of relatives for whom they were common clay. But this had always been his disappointment, the further he penetrated into the arcana of aristocracy and into the ranks of the distinguished--nobody ever seemed quite so imposing as his or her name in the paper. Taken in the mass, aristocracy of birth or brain was dazzling, overwhelming; but the individual was always amiably imperfect, with the exception, of course, of the one perfect being in the universe, Eleanor Wyndwood.

“You don’t think much of your family, Miss Regan,” he said, smiling.

“No, and they return the compliment. They don’t realize how near Doomsday is for us aristocrats. We must disappear. We have played our part.”

“What part?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose the upper classes, the people of leisure, existed to evolve culture. That can now be grafted on to the artisan, and both the upper and the lower classes can disappear. We want the amalgam now--culture without its vices, and work without its vulgarity.”

“Shall we ever get what we want?”

She smiled with ineffable sadness and weariness. “I sometimes think that that makes life worth living. That and bishops. This is the only world in which bishops could happen. There is some consolation, too, in Royal Drawing-rooms and kangaroos. Do you think there is any other planet in which ladies walk backward or animals hop? I wonder. When one feels weary of the burden of existence, one thinks of the humor of Creation and stays on. It is a delicious world.”

“Do you mean that you enjoy the imperfections of life?”

“I don’t know what I mean. I hate to see ill-fed people, and I hate to see well-fed people. Unhappy people pain me and happy people irritate me. What _do_ I mean? Oh, I think I see it at last. It is the unintelligent people that I hate to see unhappy, and the intelligent people that I hate to see happy. People who have brains and are happy can’t have souls. The fools ought to have creature comforts because they are fools enough to value them before all else. How I envy my maid’s capacity for envying me! Thank you, Mr. Strang, you have enabled me to understand myself.”

The music stopped, but the player was at once monopolized by the bishop. Fragments of their conversation reached the ears of the couple.

“She’s trying to convert him to Christianity,” Olive observed, gravely; “didn’t I tell you she was the most unpractical creature? She’s always leading forlorn hopes.”

“How is Herbert--my cousin--painting her?” he asked.

“Oh! he’s only had one sitting. She’s to be done _à l’ordinaire_, but she had her hair dressed specially--such a waste of time--and was manicured, and the man took as long manicuring her as if she had been Briareus.”

“I mean, what will she wear?”

“Oh! a sentimental expression--the sort of look you see in a girl’s face when she’s sitting on the stairs with her hand in a man’s.”

A shudder traversed her shoulders, crinkling the blue bodice that covered them. “For the rest, she will be clothed in one of those creamy low-necked gowns that become her so well.”

Before the evening was over Olive was induced to sing. Matthew Strang was startled to find her choosing a love-song, and he was as astonished by the passionate intensity of her vocalization as by the beauty of her rich contralto voice.

“_Ninon, Ninon_,” she sang. “_Que fais-tu de la vie--toi qui n’as pas d’amour?_” And the notes melted exquisitely in pity. The tears returned to his eyes. It was his tragedy, it was Eleanor’s tragedy, it was everybody’s tragedy. “_Ninon, Ninon, que fais-tu de la vie?_”

Very few days went by before he rang Mrs. Wyndwood’s bell. The mental image of Eleanor sitting to Herbert was the motor that drove him to call. He had only seen his volatile cousin once or twice since they had dined together at the Limners’--Herbert Strang’s curious facility for taking up and dropping people had persisted unchanged. But the couple were destined to meet now, for victorias and hansoms hovered outside Mrs. Wyndwood’s house, and Matthew Strang found that he had stumbled upon a formal “At Home,” at which Herbert was fetching and carrying strawberry-ices to perspiring beauty. The popular painter noted with a novel thrill of alarm the boyish good looks of his friend, whose spruce, smiling figure was so visibly the cynosure of feminine eyes. Happily for his peace of mind, Eleanor was too busy welcoming her miscellaneous visitors to allot much attention to Herbert, who seemed, indeed, amply content with engaging the interest of half a dozen fair women, not counting an occasional interlude of Miss Regan. Matthew Strang slowly ploughed his way to the hostess, a cool-looking angel in white, through the block of bonneted ladies, amid which an occasional man stood out unpicturesque.

“You seem surprised to see me,” he said, in low tones, into which he infused an intimate note.

“Yes, indeed,” said Eleanor, with a little frank laugh. “How did you know it was my day?”

He smiled mysteriously, wondering the while if she could hear his heart beat above the feminine babble.

“You ought not to have come,” pursued Eleanor, with a little pout that made her face adorable. “We pay you the compliment of not asking you to our tea-fights, and this is how you appreciate it.”

“Forgive me,” he said, intoxicatingly flattered. “I do appreciate it. I didn’t know. I came for a cup of tea, with no idea of fighting for it.”

“Then let me give it you. Do you take sugar?”

And she handed him the cup, which he took with a hand that trembled. Then a press of fresh people cut him off from her, and she made no effort to keep him by her side. Gloom invaded his breast again. He had to speak to some of the crowd, and he did his duty with ill grace. He feared it would be too presumptuous to outstay the intrusive crew, so he resolved to escape as soon as possible. But Herbert captured him with a hearty hand-shake, and introduced him--with a certain proprietary pride--to his bevy of dames, and he was perforce added to the applausive circle in the centre of which Herbert quizzed the rest of the company and the universe at large.

“Isn’t that Lily O’Reilly talking with Mrs. Wyndwood?” he said, catching Olive’s passing eye.

“Sure, and it is that,” answered Olive, permitting the eye an unwonted roguish twinkle. “She is talking about her new novel.”

“Wonderful woman,” soliloquized Herbert for the benefit of his galaxy. “She is more read by the superfine critics than any other lady novelist in London.”

“Oh, Mr. Strang,” protested Lady William Dallox, a petite, elegant creature with an air of having stepped off a decorative panel, “why, the critics all slate her awfully.”

“I know. But that’s her revenge--to threaten her reviewers with libel actions, so that they have to read her to see if she deserved their slatings.”

“You’re a saucy cynic, sir,” said Olive, laughingly.

“What is a cynic?” airily retorted Herbert. “An accurate observer of life.”

“Beyond that definition cynicism cannot go,” said Olive, ceasing to smile.

“What a pity!” said Herbert. “At any rate, it is true as far as it goes. To call Miss O’Reilly’s hair chameleon-colored would be considered cynical. Yet it is but accurate observation. The inaccurate observer of life would call it auburn, not seeing that it is only auburn _pro tem._, and that it goes through as many editions as her books. Similarly, to call her complexion hand-painted--”

“Would be rudeness,” interrupted Olive, more severely, “especially as I heard her asking Mrs. Wyndwood to introduce to her the young man who looked so much like the hero of one of her novels.”

“Ah, that puts another complexion on the matter,” said Herbert, lightly. Under cover of the confusion of feminine compliment that greeted the quick sally, Matthew Strang slipped away, leaden-hearted, from the sight of the smiles and the sound of the laughter. Even had he been free, what chance would he have had, pitted against his brilliant cousin? He knew himself a silent man, scarcely speaking, unless abnormally moved, much less scintillating. He had only one talent--one poor talent for expressing the Beautiful to one sense--and this one talent he had prostituted. Everything grew black to his morbid mood. The dying afternoon, cool, sun-glinted, had no beauty for him; the speckless grooms outside the door irritated him; the shining carriages dashing along the great arteries of the West End, bearing their lolling occupants to dress and dinner, stirred him to something of the same revolt that he had felt when he had walked the metropolis of wealth and fashion in broken boots. After all, he had never really entered this circle of pleasure, it had always been a fairy-ring he could not step into. Beautiful as his boots were externally, there had always been a nail, a pebble inside; that adverse atom which, according to the philosopher, suffices to destroy happiness. His had always been a life of labor, of misery. He was still of the down-trodden classes, of those whom fate, if not man, grinds down, whose lives slip by in a vain yearning for the sun, who see happiness as a phantasm that is only solid for others, and love as the mocking mirage of a beauty that is far away. He was angry--so unreasonably angry that the unreason seemed a reason for fresh anger with himself. And he was angry, not only with himself, but with Herbert, with the world, aye, with Eleanor Wyndwood and her idle, hare-brained visitors, reeking of the toilet-table, chattering of poems, pictures, and symphonies.

The thought of his mother came up from dim recesses of memory--still babbling in the asylum that was her haven of refuge after a life of storm and stress and sorrow and weary watchings for a vagrant mate--and he was jealous of Eleanor for her sake, jealous of her beauty, her breeding, her wealth, her fine dresses, her carriage, her fashionable visitors; jealous of all that made her different from his mother, of all that made her life fuller, freer, higher, richer--of all, in fine, that made him love her! Ah, God, how he loved her! He could scarcely keep back the hysteric sobs that swelled at his throat. But they had always been shut out from the sunshine, his mother and he. Happiness! oh, to clasp it, to hold it tight! Nothing counted except happiness--ambition, success, art, money, alike vain gauds, shadows. He walked past his turning, and far beyond. Lights began to twinkle in the great tired city; the summer evening brooded, fresh and cool, over the vast stretches of dusty stone. When at last he reached his studio the sun had set. He saw the pale rose-glow, mystically tender, at the end of the long suburban avenue of green trees and yellow street-lamps; it spoke to him of peace and rest and resignation, and some secret beauty behind all.

Not many days later his restless feet took him again to the Mayfair house. He would speak out--at some opportunity which the shrewd, kindly Olive would not fail to afford him--he would tell Eleanor all she meant to him, how she was becoming the pivot of his thought, how she and she alone might inspire his art to higher purpose. He would not ask for love, only for a noble friendship; he needed an understanding soul to sympathize with his inmost self, his aspirations, his agonies. He had always been hedged in by thick barriers of ice, through which no human soul had ever pierced. No one knew what tinder for divine fires lay awaiting the spark within, nor how cold and lonely he felt in his glacial isolation.

But at first his visit threatened to be even more disappointing than the last. Another man was taking tea--or rather, eating nougat with Mrs. Wyndwood and Miss Regan--young and fascinating of feature, but with a fatal air of the minor poet. And a poet, indeed, he proved to be: a poet of considerable pretensions, who might win the bays if only he could get over his unfortunate appearance, which seemed to tie him down to sugared prettiness and elegant concetti. Matthew Strang had read one of his dainty, gilt-edged volumes, wherein dapper lyrics posed in the centre of broad-margined pages, and he wondered resentfully why Mrs. Wyndwood did not lecture him into spirituality instead of feeding him with nougat, which his poetry already resembled. But though Harold Lavender was accommodating enough to go soon, Matthew Strang profited little by his retirement from the field, for Eleanor seemed to be in a freakish mood, as if the contagion of Olive had infected her, or the nougat had made her terrestrial, and she played a lively second to her vivacious friend in recapitulating the charms of their dog, Roy, a slumbrous Scotch collie, that he had barely noted before, but which now became the climax of creation.

“We’ve only hired him,” Mrs. Wyndwood explained. “Lady Arthur, to whom the house belongs, asked us to take charge of him, so he’s in the inventory. His father was a pedigree dog, and won five hundred guineas.”

“Yes, her ladyship had him catalogued completely, lest we should lose a bit of him,” said Olive, rolling the animal over, and digging her fingers affectionately into his fur and pulling his ears and his paws and his tail to illustrate her recital of his perfections. “Brown-and-white coat--the brown of an autumn filbert, with a collar and shirt-front of white fur over skin as pink as rosebuds--look at it--black gums and palate, with the whitest of teeth, canines, I believe; a tail of russet and black and white that waves like a palm-tree. Observe the little black ring; we identified him once by it, though we had never noticed it before, had we, my beauty?”

Mrs. Wyndwood took up the ball. “He was lost, stolen, or strayed, and information was lodged at a police-station that a collie with a black ring round his tail had been found. We told the superintendent ours had no such ring.”

“The inaccurate observation of life, you see, Mr. Strang,” broke in Olive, “which, according to your cousin, delivers one from cynicism.”

“But cynicism has something to do with dogs, hasn’t it?” observed Mrs. Wyndwood, smilingly.

“Yes,” said Olive. “We must get Mr. Strang to define cynicism as the accurate observation of dogs. Don’t forget to tell him, Nor, when you sit to him to-morrow.”

Matthew Strang moved uncomfortably on his seat, raging inwardly, and scarcely knowing whether he was more jealous of Herbert or of Roy.

“Well, that superintendent must have been a cynic,” Mrs. Wyndwood went on, “for he recommended us to go and look at the dog all the same. It was a wild expedition--nearly eleven o’clock at night--we routed out a nest of costers who lived over a stable, and were invaded by means of a ladder. I felt like a robber Viking, all heart-beat and adventure. It was glorious!”

“Yes; and Roy came bounding out and nearly toppled you over. And all the little costers came crowding out of bed in their night-dresses, and you gave Mrs. Coster a sovereign for them in mistake for a shilling.”

Mrs. Wyndwood went into a fit of mirth over the recollection. For once her melodious laugh grated upon his ears. What in the world was there to laugh about? It seemed all the most puerile nonsense. He could have cried more easily.

“Remark his lively air,” said Olive. “His intuitive sympathy is wonderful. He is sad when you weep, and merry when you frivol.”

The painter merely heard the dog panting like an impatient steam-engine.

“He wants a run, I think,” he observed, ungraciously.

“Aye, you should see him run!” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “It makes one feel young again to see him scampering up hill and down dale. Even a mudhill delights him; it reminds him of his native moors, doesn’t it, Roy, dear?”

Roy stared at her with large, unblinking eyes.

“But we are not dressed well enough to go out with him now,” said Olive. “I told you what a snob he was, Mr. Strang. Shake paws with the gentleman, dear. He’s smart enough even for your tastes. See how he likes you, Mr. Strang. If he didn’t, the skin over his dear old nose would snarl up into gathers and puckers and frills. There! That’s his favorite attitude--on his hind-legs, with his fore-paws placably on a beloved lap. Now he is happy. How simple life is for him! Lucky dog!”

“Ah, you forget that he, too, has his ideal, his unachieved aspiration,” said Mrs. Wyndwood. “The disappointment of his life is that he can’t catch birds. He snaps at everything that soars in air--even insects; it exasperates him to find things hovering mockingly overhead in defiance of gravity. He sits on his haunches and wails over the emptiness of life.”

Matthew Strang gave Roy a kindlier pat. But the creature was still stretched on the tapis of conversation, and Olive proceeded to a whimsical account of the partition of Roy between Eleanor and herself, as joint house-keepers. Since they could not bisect the collie, he belonged to each on alternate days, so that if he were lost again, the onus would rest on the mistress for the day.

By this time the painter could hardly refrain from kicking the dog, and when Mrs. Wyndwood added that Roy was only eighteen months old, he rose to go.

Mrs. Wyndwood’s expression changed.

“You’re not running away yet?” she said.

“I must,” he murmured, his ill-humor abating under the sweet seriousness of her face.

“Why, you haven’t talked to us at all--we want to hear more about technique.”

“Technique can’t be talked,” he said, still surly.

“We haven’t any materials for practical demonstrations,” said Olive, “not even a black-board.”

“I should love to be an artist,” cried Mrs. Wyndwood. “To feel beauty growing under one’s hand--what a sense of creative divinity. I never sit to an artist without thinking what a privilege is his---- Now what _are_ you laughing at, Olive?”

“Nothing, except your subtle way of complimenting yourself on your good looks. Now, if Mr. Strang will be good, and waste a little more valuable time on two foolish women, I will pay him a compliment.”

He sat down, his curiosity stimulated, and Olive, producing a box of Turkish cigarettes, asked if he objected to her smoking. Permission being obtained, she got him to apply a light to her cigarette, and then bade him smoke one himself. He was relieved to find Mrs. Wyndwood an abstainer.

“There,” said Olive, puffing out a thin cloud, “that is the highest compliment I can pay a man--to expose myself in all my horror. I smoke neither for toothache nor neuralgia, but for sheer viciousness. See the result of our visit to Podnieff--Nor picked up ideals, and I, smoke. Perhaps they are the same thing in the long-run.”

Matthew Strang dissented vehemently. “Ideals are the only realities.”

“Nonsense, they are the only things that change,” retorted Miss Regan. “The ideal woman of to-morrow will smoke shag and birdseye in long clay pipes.”

Eleanor Wyndwood came to his assistance, and together they did battle with Olive, who took up the most perverse Philistine positions and fought as if for life, eluding, shuffling, dodging, equivocating, turning, twisting, doubling upon herself with the most daring defiance of consistency, and the most bizarre flashes of wit and argument. She would snatch a victory by specious logic that could only hold for a moment, and stand in as serenely mocking triumph upon a crumbling sand-heap as if she knew herself upon a rock, and was not about to bound off to the next sand-heap the instant the tide of reason swept this one hopelessly away. The painter found a celestial knitting of soul in thus fighting side by side with Eleanor; he did not blench even when she quoted a quatrain from Harold Lavender to enforce her point. But the shades of earth returned when she referred to Herbert Strang.

“Here is an example of a man who has absolutely nothing to gain from Art--who doesn’t need it, who has means--to whose sceptical spirit the applause of the world is indifferent. And yet the other morning--when the sunshine called one to the joys of the _dolce far niente_--he sat for hours toiling painfully at his Art, and fretting because he had allowed his right hand to lose its cunning. He had neglected the Ideal, but now his soul thirsts for it again, and the Ideal is avenged.”

Matthew Strang felt a malicious satisfaction in the thought that Herbert was not getting on very well with the portrait. He had a sudden curiosity to see it.

“You are really too simple, Nor,” said Olive, plaintively. “Can’t you see the man’s only trying to spread out the sittings so as to have you come there? I dare say he can paint as well as the present Mr. Strang.”

Eleanor flushed, hotly. “Oh, there’s no deception about his limitations. I am almost sorry I consented.”

Matthew Strang’s heart leaped exultant. “He did let his gifts rust,” he said, magnanimously. “But I dare say his old talent will come back after a little practice. He had a fine color-sense in the old days.”

His magnanimity seemed to please both ladies, especially Olive, and the discussion wound up suddenly in a congruity as unexpected as any of her arguments.

“You were great chums then, weren’t you?” she asked.

“Yes; he was my cicerone in artistic society. I might almost say in civilized society. I owe him a good deal.” He had no shame in hinting at his humble origin to these two unconventional gentlewomen.

“Where is his studio?” he asked.

They told him; but Miss Regan seemed to be suddenly uneasy. A little clock on the mantel-piece struck six silvery notes. He thought his hostesses might want to dress elaborately for some dinner-party or the theatre, so he tore himself away, and, jumping into a hansom, drove, on the impulse of the moment, to Herbert’s studio.

Olive sighed wearily, and leaned her head upon her elbows, which were planted on the tea-table. Eleanor stooped and kissed her.

“Lie down, dear, till dinner. The heat has been too much for you. You look tired to death.”

“Heigho! I wish I was really. What’s the use of living, Nor, darling?”

“Oh, life is so beautiful!” exclaimed Eleanor, with shining eyes. “Think of Art, think of Nature! Cheer up, Olive. The horrid season will soon be over, and then hey for Devonshire!”

“And the Creamery,” added the girl, in hollow accents. “But let’s get away at once, dear.”

“We must stay for a few things yet--we promised,” Mrs. Wyndwood reminded her sweetly. “There’s the dance at Lady Surbiton’s, and the reception of--”

Olive interrupted her with a burst of laughter that sounded hysterical to her friend’s anxious ears. “Oh, it’s a mad, bad world! But there are Lady Surbiton’s tea-gowns!”

“Do lie down, dear.”

“Why aren’t there convents for unbelievers, Nor? It’s an oversight. I’d get me into a nunnery, but I should be suspected of piety. The hospitals are overrun. They are as impossible as Ramsgate; and your nurse is suspected of being a heroine. When will people understand that altruism is a passion, and that nobody wants to be patted on the back for gratifying instinct? When I did that month’s hard in the Dublin Hospital--but that was before I knew you, dear--half my family thought me mad, and the other half a saint. But I was only incapable, Nor, dearest. I couldn’t dress ugly wounds as if I wasn’t feeling the pain of them. No, I’m a failure. There’s nothing for it save suicide.”

“Or marriage,” said Mrs. Wyndwood, softly, laying her cheek to her friend’s.

Olive moved her head away, shuddering violently. “I’d breed dogs rather.” She rose to her feet and stretched her arms. “They are happy, aren’t you, Roy?” She leaned down and pulled the collie’s jaws apart. “Eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating. Why didn’t Evolution stop with you, instead of going further and faring worse? But still there are those birds, Roy. And on our side there’s Art and there’s Nature, Eleanor Wyndwood says. Which Art is it going to be, by-the-way, Eleanor Wyndwood--Poetry or Painting? But it’s two to one on Painting.”

“You’re feverish, darling,” said Eleanor, troubled. “Don’t talk at random.”

“I’m talking straight, dear. Two Strangs to one Lavender. And what has become of Spirit, dearest? That used to come before Art and Nature!”

“And who said it doesn’t still?” Eleanor answered, deprecatingly. Then, with a passionate cry that set her beautiful bosom heaving, “My God, Olive, why do you misjudge me? Can’t you understand earnest seeking?” Tears came into her eyes and trickled down her face.

Olive kissed them away. “I’m a brute, Eleanor. The heat’s too much for both of us. Good-night!”

“Going to lie down, dearest?”

“No; going to bed.”

* * * * *

Matthew Strang had rung several times before he could gain admittance to his cousin’s studio. Herbert appeared in his shirt-sleeves, grinning and yawning.

“Tit for tat,” he said. “But I’m awfully glad you came, old man. I was just dreaming of you. By Jove, isn’t it hot?”

When Herbert said “old man,” in his caressing voice, Matthew became as clay in the hands of the potter. It seemed so good to have the friendship of this sunny being. He answered affectionately that it _was_ hot.

“You haven’t seen this den before?” said Herbert. “Not so swell as yours. But then I’m hard up.”

Matthew smiled incredulously, for the studio was charming.

“You’re doing a portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood, I hear.”

“Who told you?”

“I was there this afternoon.”

“Yes? Did you see her friend Miss Regan?”

“She is always there.”

“I know. Isn’t she a jolly little girl?”

“She’s very odd,” said Matthew.

“Odd? You Philistine! She’s the most amusing girl in London. And so unaffected! You can say anything to her--talk about anything. No beastly prudishness. That’s what I like in a woman. The other day she was complaining gravely that a woman couldn’t be a burglar because it would land her in compromising situations. Therefore there never could be thorough equality of the sexes, she maintained. Wasn’t it quaint? She sits here smoking cigarettes while I paint that saintly friend of hers, and all the while rattles on in the most delightful fashion. What a flow of spirits! And, by Jove! the clever, biting things she says make your hair curl. I’m not in it with her, though I try hard. I draw her out to talk about her relations--it’s better than Thackeray. She’s no end of a swell, you know.”

“I know.”

“And disgustingly rich. In short, she’d be intolerable if she wasn’t herself. What an enviable lot! All the B’s--Beauty, Bullion, Blue Blood, and Brilliancy. No wonder she’s light-hearted! They say she had an eccentric dad, which accounts for her--a man who wasted one of his fortunes on socialistic experiments! But she knows better than that. Eccentricity in the parent is epigram in the child.”

“Which is an epigram,” said Matthew, laughing, and considerably relieved by this outburst on his cousin’s part. “But _your_ parents were not eccentric.”

“Indeed? Don’t you see any eccentricity in the poor old governor’s trying to make an artist out of me?”

“Where _is_ that portrait?” asked Matthew, amused.

“Here it is, you duffer, staring you in the face on the easel all the time. Don’t say you didn’t recognize it. Please don’t.”

“Now that I know who it is,” began Matthew, laughing.

“It _is_ ghastly, old man, isn’t it? But that girl distracts me with her talk.”

“What made you attempt it?” asked Matthew, candidly.

“I wanted to hear her talk.”

“Whom?”

“Miss Regan.”

Matthew felt a great wave of affection for his cousin.

“But why don’t you paint _her_?”

“She wouldn’t sit. I had to ask her friend, knowing she’d accompany her. But I’m half sorry I undertook it now.”

“You’re certainly not doing her justice!”

There was still plenty of light. He took up the brush, and within a quarter of an hour Mrs. Wyndwood’s sweetly spiritual face gleamed unmistakably upon the canvas. Herbert watched with admiration those sure, swift strokes, behind which lay so arduous a training, so irrepressible an instinct.

“You seem to have her face by heart,” he said at last, with a suspicious twinkle. “But don’t let me interrupt you.” And lighting a cigarette, he threw himself on a lounge in an attitude that curiously recalled old times to the painter.

Matthew Strang painted on lovingly till he could no longer see his palette, then Herbert took him to his new club--the Epicurean--and gave him a delightful dinner for his pains, and over the kümmel and the coffee borrowed a hundred pounds from him so as not to sell out a stock that was depreciated for the moment.