The Incomplete Amorist

"He can't bear the sight of me at all now! He's longing to be rid of me! Well, thank Heaven I'm going to Paris! I will have a grass-lawn dress over green, with three rows of narrow lace insertion, and a hat with yellow roses and—oh, it can't be true. It's too good to be true. Well, it's a good thing to be hated sometimes, by some people, if they only hate you enough!"

"'So you're going to foreign parts, Miss,' says I."

Mrs. Symes had flung back her bonnet strings and was holding a saucerful of boiling tea skilfully poised on the fingers of one hand. "'Yes, Mrs. Symes,' says she, 'don't you wish you was going too?' she says. And she laughed, but I'm not easy blinded, and well I see as she only laughed to 'ide a bleedin' 'art. 'Not me, Miss,' says I; 'nice figure I should look a-goin' to a furrin' boardin' school at my time of life.'

"'It ain't boardin' school,' says she. 'I'm a-going to learn to paint pictures. I'll paint your portrait when I come home,' says she, and laughs again—I could see she done it to keep the tears back.

"'I'm sorry for you, Miss, I'm sure,' I says, not to lose the chance of a word in season, 'but I hope it'll prove a blessing to you—I do that.'"

"'Oh, it'll be a blessing right enough,' says she, and keeps on laughing a bit wild like. When the art's full you can't always stop yourself. She'd a done better to 'ave a good cry and tell me 'er troubles. I could a cheered her up a bit p'raps. You know whether I'm considered a comfort at funerals and christenings, Mrs. James."

"I do," said Mrs. James sadly; "none don't know it better."

"You'd a thought she'd a bin glad of a friend in need. But no. She just goes on a-laughing fit to bring tears to your eyes to hear her, and says she, 'I hope you'll all get on all right without me.'"

"I hope you said as how we should miss her something dreadful," said Mrs. James anxiously, "Have another cup."

"Thank you, my dear. Do you take me for a born loony? Course I did. Said the parish wouldn't be the same without her, and about her pretty reading and all. See here what she give me."

Mrs. James unrolled a violet petticoat.

"Good as new, almost," she said, looking critically at the hem. "Specially her being taller'n me. So what's not can be cut away, and no loss. She kep' on a-laughing an' a-smiling till the old man he come in and he says in his mimicking way, 'Lizzie,' says 'e, 'they're a-waitin' to fit on your new walkin' costoom,' he says. So I come away, she a-smiling to the last something awful to see."

"Dear, dear," said Mrs. James.

"But you mark my words—she don't deceive me. If ever I see a bruised reed and a broken 'art on a young gell's face I see it on hers this day. She may laugh herself black in the face, but she won't laugh me into thinking what I knows to be far otherwise."

"Ah," said Mrs. James resignedly, "we all 'as it to bear one time or another. Young gells is very deceitful though, in their ways, ain't they?"

Book 2.—The Man

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ONE AND THE OTHER

"Some idiot," remarked Eustace Vernon, sipping Vermouth at a little table, "insists that, if you sit long enough outside the Café de la Paix, you will see everyone you have ever known or ever wanted to know pass by. I have sat here for half-an-hour—and—voila."

"You met me, half an hour ago," said the other man.

"Oh, you!" said Vernon affectionately.

"And your hat has gone off every half minute ever since," said the other man.

"Ah, that's to the people I've known. It's the people I've wanted to know that are the rarity."

"Do you mean people you have wanted to know and not known?"

"There aren't many of those," said Vernon; "no it's—Jove, that's a sweet woman!"

"I hate the type," said the other man briefly: "all clothes—no real human being."

The woman was beautifully dressed, in the key whose harmonies are only mastered by Frenchwomen and Americans. She turned her head as her carriage passed, and Vernon's hat went off once more.

"I'd forgotten her profile," said Vernon, "and she's learned how to dress since I saw her last. She's quite human, really, and as charming as anyone ought to be."

"So I should think," said the other man. "I'm sorry I said that, but I didn't know you knew her. How's trade?"

"Oh, I did a picture—well, but a picture! I did it in England in the Spring. Best thing I've done yet. Come and see it."

"I should like to look you up. Where do you hang out?"

"Eighty-six bis Rue Notre Dame des Champs," said Vernon. "Everyone in fiction lives there. It's the only street on the other side that authors seem ever to have dreamed of. Still, it's convenient, so I herd there with all sorts of blackguards, heroes and villains and what not. Eighty-six bis."

"I'll come," said the other man, slowly. "Do you know, Vernon, I'd like awfully to get at your point of view—your philosophy of life?"

"Haven't you got one, my dear chap!—'sufficient unto' is my motto."

"You paint pictures,", the other went on, "so very much too good for the sort of life you lead."

Vernon laughed.

"My dear Temple," he said, "I live, mostly, the life of a vestal virgin."

"You know well enough I'm not quarrelling with the way you spend your evenings," said his dear Temple; "it's your whole outlook that doesn't match your work. Yet there must be some relation between the two, that's what I'd like to get at."

There is a bond stronger than friendship, stronger than love—a bond that cannot be forged in any other shop than the one—the bond between old schoolfellows. Vernon had sometimes wondered why he "stood so much" from Temple. It is a wonder that old schoolfellows often feel, mutually.

"The subject you've started," said he, "is of course, to me, the most interesting. Please develop your thesis."

"Well then, your pictures are good, strong, thorough stuff, with sentiment—yes, just enough sentiment to keep them from the brutality of Degas or the sensualism of Latouche. Whereas you, yourself, seem to have no sentiment."

"I? No sentiment! Oh, Bobby, this is too much! Why, I'm a mass of it! Ask—"

"Yes, ask any woman of your acquaintance. That's just it—or just part of it. You fool them into thinking—oh, I don't know what; but you don't fool me."

"I haven't tried."

"Then you're not brutal, except half a dozen times in the year when you—And I've noticed that when your temper goes smash your morals go at the same time. Is that cause or effect? What's the real you like, and where do you keep it?"

"The real me," said Vernon, "is seen in my pictures, and—and appreciated by my friends; you for instance, are, I believe, genuinely attached to me."

"Oh, rot!" said Bobby.

"I don't see," said Vernon, moving his iron chair to make room for two people at the next table, "why you should expect my pictures to rhyme with my life. A man's art doesn't rhyme with his personality. Most often it contradicts flatly. Look at musicians—what a divine art, and what pigs of high priests! And look at actors—but no, one can't; the spectacle is too sickening."

"I sometimes think," said Temple, emptying his glass, "that the real you isn't made yet. It's waiting for—"

"For the refining touch of a woman's hand, eh? You think the real me is—Oh, Temple, Temple, I've no heart for these childish imaginings! The real me is the man that paints pictures, damn good pictures, too, though I say it."