At The Gate Of Samaria E-Book

William John Locke

• Herausgeber: William John Locke
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

It was a severe room, scrupulously neat. Along one side ran a bookcase, with beaded glass doors, containing, as one might see by peering through the spaces, the collected, unread literature of two stern generations. A few old prints, placed in bad lights, hung on the walls. In the centre of the room was a leather-covered library table, with writing materials arranged in painful precision. A couch was lined along one wall, in the draught of the door. On either side of the fireplace were ranged two stiff leather armchairs. In one of these chairs sat an old man, in the other a faded woman just verging upon middle age. The old man was looking at a picture which he supported on his knees-a narrow, oblong strip of canvas nailed on to a rough wooden frame. The woman eyed him with some interest, as if awaiting a decision.

Leseprobe

William John Locke

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Table of contents

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

CHAPTER XXIV.

CHAPTER XXV.

CHAPTER XXVI.

CHAPTER XXVII.

CHAPTER I.

It was a severe room, scrupulously neat. Along one side ran a bookcase, with beaded glass doors, containing, as one might see by peering through the spaces, the collected, unread literature of two stern generations. A few old prints, placed in bad lights, hung on the walls. In the centre of the room was a leather-covered library table, with writing materials arranged in painful precision. A couch was lined along one wall, in the draught of the door. On either side of the fireplace were ranged two stiff leather armchairs.In one of these chairs sat an old man, in the other a faded woman just verging upon middle age. The old man was looking at a picture which he supported on his knees-a narrow, oblong strip of canvas nailed on to a rough wooden frame. The woman eyed him with some interest, as if awaiting a decision.They were father and daughter, and bore a strange family resemblance to each other. Both faces were pale, their foreheads high and narrow, marked by faint horizontal lines, their eyes gray and cold, their upper lips long and thin, setting tightly, without mobility, upon the lower. The only essential point of difference was that the father’s chin was weakly pointed, the daughter’s squarer and harder. Both faces gave one the impression of negativeness, joylessness, seeming to lack the power of strong emotive expression. One can see such, minus the refinement of gentle birth and social amenities, in the pews of obscure dissenting chapels, testifying that they have been led thither not by strong convictions, but by the force of mild circumstance.Indeed, as is the case with hundreds of our upper middle-class families, the Davenants had descended from a fierce old Puritan stock, and though the reality of their Puritanism had gradually lost itself in the current of more respectable orthodoxy, its shadow hung over them still. The vigorous enthusiasm that spurred the Puritan on to lofty action was gone; the vague dread of sin that kept him in moral and mental inactivity alone remained. Perhaps it is this survival amongst us of the negative element of Puritanism that produces in England the curious anomaly of education without enlightenment. It has dulled our perception of life as an art, whose “great incidents,” as Fielding finely says, “are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the several members of a fine statue or a noble poem.” It has caused us to live in a perpetual twilight in which the possibilities of existence loom fantastic and indistinct. The Davenants were gentlefolk, holding a good position in the small country town of Durdleham; they visited among the county families, and, on ordinary, conventional grounds, considered themselves to belong to the cultured classes. They were the curious yet familiar product of the old-fashioned, high-church Toryism impregnated with the Puritan taint.The light was fading through the French window behind the old man’s chair. He laid down the canvas on his lap and looked in a puzzled way at the fire. Then he raised it nearer to his eyes for further examination. “ This is really very dreadful,” he said at last, looking at his daughter. “ Something will have to be done soon,” replied the latter. “ It is so horribly vulgar, Grace,” said the old man; “look at that boy’s nose—and that drunken man—his face is a nightmare of evil. I really must begin to talk seriously to Clyde.”Mrs. Blather smiled somewhat pityingly. Since the earliest days of her long widowhood she had undertaken the charge of her father’s house and the care of her two younger sisters, Janet and Clytie. Her familiarity, therefore, with the seamy side of Clytie’s nature had been of long duration. “ You might as well talk to that fender, papa,” she said. “Clytie has got it into her head that she is going to be an artist, and no amount of talking will get it out.” “ It’s all through her visiting those friends of hers, the Farquharsons. They are not nice people for her to know. I shall not let her go there again.” “ If she goes on like this there is no knowing what will happen.” “ Where did the child get these repulsive and ungirlish notions from?” the old man asked querulously.The conception of the picture was not that of a young girl, and though the execution was crude and untrained, there was a bold cruelty of touch that saved it from being amateurish. The canvas was divided into two panels. On the one was painted a tiny bully of a boy with his arm rounded across his throat, about to strike a weakly, poverty-stricken little girl. They were children of the poorest classes, the boy realistically, offensively dirty—the petit morveux in its absolute sense. Behind them was the open doorway of a red-brick, jerry-built cottage, showing a strip of torn and dirty matting along the passage that lost itself in the gloom beyond. On the other panel was the corner of a public house in a low slum, the window lights and a gas-lamp throwing a lurid glare upon wet pavement and the figures of a woman and a drunken man. The faces were those of the children in the first picture, and the eternal tragedy was repeating itself. The man’s face was loathsome in its sodden ferocity; the woman, with a child in her arms, was reeling from the blow. The evident haste in which the panels had been painted, the glaring, unsoftened colouring, heightened as if by impressionist design the coarse realism of the effect. Above was written the legend, “La joie de vivre” and in the left-hand bottom corner, “Clytie Davenant pinxit.” “ She has certainly grown much worse of late,” sighed Mrs. Blather, holding out her thin, short hand to shield her face from the fire.There was a pause of some moments. Mr. Davenant ceased nursing the picture and stood it on the floor. “ Have you quite made up your mind, papa,” said Mrs.Blather at length, “not to let Clytie go to the Slade School in London?” “ It is out of the question,” replied the old man. “ I don’t think so, papa. It would perhaps do her good. A year or so’s hard work would take all these silly ideas out of her.” “ I question it,” said Mr. Davenant. “They are not silly ideas. They are debased, degraded ideas.” “ My dear papa, they are only fads. All young girls have them. Look how crazy Janet was to join the cookery classes. We let her join, and now she hates the sight of a pie-dish. With Clytie it is quite the same, only she wants to daub.” “ Well, let her daub in a decent way at home,” replied the old man testily.Mrs. Blather shrugged her lean shoulders. “ We have tried that and it hasn’t succeeded, apparently,” she said drily. “You seldom come in her way; you don’t know how unpleasant things are for Janet and myself. What do you think she had the impertinence to tell me this morning? She said that we were not real people. We were machines or abstractions based, I think she said, on a formula, or something of that sort. She was pining to live amongst living human beings. And then she is so rude to visitors. What do you think she said to the vicar, who came, at Janet’s request, to talk to her about her shameful neglect of her religious duties? She said, if he was a pillar of the Church, she saw no reason why she should be a seat-cushion.” “ Tut, tut,” said the old man angrily. He was vicar’s churchwarden, and a power in the parish. “ And then,” continued Mrs. Blather, “when I scolded her for her rudeness, she said that if she had been a man she would have sworn at him for his impertinence. Really people will soon be afraid of coming to the house.” “ They will indeed,” said Mr. Davenant.Like a wise woman, Mrs. Blather did not press her point. She knew she had thoroughly alarmed her father and had shown him but one way out of the difficulty. His taking it, if left to himself, was only a question of time. She rang the bell for the servant to come and light Mr. Davenant’s gas, and then she left him to his reflections.Mr. Davenant possessed some landed property, which he had occupied his life in mismanaging. Fortunately for him, his wife had brought him a small fortune which sufficed to keep up a position, modest when compared with that of the Davenants of former days, but still high enough to satisfy the social aspirations of his family. He had lived a colourless life, severe and respectable. Even his university days had passed in a dull uniformity, leaving no glamour behind them. He had walked honourably and blindly in the paths his parents had indicated, and, now that he was nearing the end of the journey, thanked God for having given him the grace not to err from them. He had married when still fairly young, and he had loved his wife in a gentlemanly, passionless way. She, poor thing, had filled up so small a space in life that she had faded out of it almost unnoticed—even by himself. He had no storms of joy or sorrow to look back upon. His thoughts, as he brooded over the fireside, generally wandered back to trifling incidents: ancient municipal interests, the mortgages on his estate, the boundary quarrels with the old earl, his neighbour.But lately he had been thinking anxiously over his daughter Clytie. She had suddenly developed out of a naughty, rebellious child into a problem. He assumed as a matter of course that he bore her the ordinary well-regulated parental affection, but in his heart of hearts he never really loved her. Until lately it had not occurred to him to think of her as anything but a child of his with a singularly unfortunate disposition which time would modify. But time, on the contrary, was accentuating it, and he realised at last that Clytie had a distinct individuality. His philosophy had left many things in heaven and earth undreamed of. He was mystified, puzzled. How could he and his delicate wife have brought this bright-haired, full-blooded, impulsive creature into existence? Her sisters were gentle, quiet women, possessing the virtues inculcated in his conception of life. Clytie seemed to possess none of them. The peasant woman in the legend could not have wondered more over her changeling. How could a daughter of his and a sister of Janet’s scoff at sacred things, defy social rules, and have an imagination that ran riot in scenes of drunkenness and outcast life?Physiology might grant a solution to the old man’s problem in the law of the alternation of heredity. His father’s youngest brother had been a family black sheep, and being the only one of the generation who had led an eventful career, was naturally never mentioned by his relations, and the record of his life perished with him. But it is possible that the positive enthusiastic principle of Clytie’s Puritan descent, reasserting itself once in every other generation, to the horror of the negative principle that otherwise ran through the race continuously, came out in her with all its strength and vigour. It brought her eager, panting up to the brink of our surging nineteenth century life, imperiously bidding her plunge in and take her part in the tumult.She was now nineteen, an age when girls try to realise themselves. She discovered that she was a greater problem to herself than to her sisters. They simply looked upon her as odd, eccentric, unpleasant to live with, and if she had not been their sister would have almost gathered up their skirts around them as they passed her by. But she was conscious of a craving within her that did not proceed from mere wilful caprice. In her earlier girlhood she had thought long and humbly over her shortcomings. Why could she not be as contented and dutiful as Janet? Why could not the interests that satisfied her sisters’ life satisfy hers? Often and often an impulse of scorn and ridicule at the littleness of Durdleham would overmaster her, and then would follow a passionate fit of remorse and repentance, received with coldness and ruffled dignity on her sisters’ part, that would send her back humiliated and rebellious to her room. From what springs of desire did all this proceed? Whither were these impulses tending?Ever since she could hold a pencil she had been able to draw. She had received lessons in painting later on, and had covered canvas after canvas with the graceful futilities the Durdleham art teacher suggested. He was a landscape painter, and Clytie had little or no feeling for landscape. Bright colour, vivid contrast, sharp tone, attracted her, but the quiet grays and faint blues of our English scenery came out dull and mechanical when she tried to paint them. At last she gave up her lessons in despair, much to the wonderment of Janet, who improved greatly under instruction, and turned out neat, complacent little water-colours which she sold at bazaars or distributed among her friends. For months Clytie never touched a brush. Art of this sort revolted her. It was soulless, futile. But by degrees, as the breach between herself and her sisters widened, her power of painting became a source of ineffable consolation—a means of self-commune. She could give external expression to the voices that haunted her. She read books with the eagerness only exhibited by the young girl craving for self-development; and the pictures they vividly impressed on her young imaginative brain she transferred to paper or canvas—not lovingly, tenderly, with the pure artistic delight of gradual creation, but hurriedly, feverishly, longing to see the thing done, the impression realised in a way in which she could understand it. When finished, or rather as soon as it had reached an impressionist stage of artistic completeness, she would feast her heart upon it for a day or two, and then throw it away, or let it lie about in a corner disregarded and forgotten.Until she was nearly eighteen Mrs. Blather had scrupulously supervised her reading, and Clytie, chafing with irritation, had been compelled either to submit or to smuggle condemned books into the house and read them surreptitiously. But at last her angry impatience at the impeccable literature that satisfied her sisters’ needs burst its restraints, and resisted vehemently and finally all censorship on the part of Mrs. Blather.It was not wholesome, this solitary, emotional, imaginative life. Her health showed signs of giving way. They called in a doctor, who prescribed rest and a change of air. One of her aunts, who lived in London, happened to want a companion for a tour on the Continent, and with many misgivings undertook to take Clytie with her. To the girl the trip was an endless succession of delight. Impressions followed each other too fast for her to realise them. The superficial features of continental life, familiar and commonplace enough to the ordinary traveller, were new to her. Groups at street corners, strangely attired soldiers, odd un-English-looking shops, the very waiters hurrying along through the intricacies of café tables with their fantastically laden trays, all excited her, filled her with the exhilaration of life and movement. Her aunt, who had hitherto shared the family opinion of Clytie, wondered greatly at the transformation. It never occurred to her that this was the natural Clytie filling her heart at last with the emotions it had hungered for.It was during this time, at a pension in Dresden, that she formed the acquaintance of the Farquharsons. Miss Davenant discovered that they and herself had common acquaintances in London, and that she had heard of Mr. Farquharson as an archæologist of some repute.The acquaintance thus formed developed quickly into a pleasant intimacy of travel. Mrs. Farquharson, a bright, clever woman of forty, was attracted toward Clytie, who, for her part, found in her new friend a natural sympathy that touched her heart. So far did their sudden friendship go, that before they parted Clytie had conditionally accepted an invitation to visit the archæologist and his wife in Harley Street.When Mr. Davenant’s permission was asked he at first demurred. He had the country-bred man’s distrust of strangers; but when his sister vouched for the social position of the Farquharsons he reluctantly consented. Clytie paid her promised visit the following winter. This was one of the turning points of her life. For the first time she found herself in an intellectual, artistic society. It was a glimpse of another world. At Durdleham young men seldom came to the house. When they did, they avoided her and talked platitudes to her sisters. At dinner parties the men remained in the dining-room long after the ladies had left. They seemed to regard them as somewhat picturesque but wearisome household adjuncts, whose absence their masculine intellects unreservedly welcomed; conversation with their partner was a dinner incident to be got through, like shaving or putting on their white ties beforehand. And the Durdleham ladies seemed to take this as a matter of course, and were equally happy to get by themselves and gossip mildly.But in Harley Street Clytie found a different order of things. Men and women seemed to have interests in common and to discuss them on a basis of perfect equality. She found, too, women speaking authoritatively on certain subjects and listened to with deference by men. All, young and old, talked to her as if she were as much absorbed in life as themselves. No one made her rage with humiliation by tolerating her with an air of languid or pompous condescension. Even the frivolities and platitudes of everyday conversation were treated in a way new to her experience. The talk was keen, incisive, exaggerated. Everyone could say what he wished without fear of springing some mine of prejudice or prudery. The atmosphere of the house breathed freedom of thought and action. She beheld others putting into form her own vague aspirations. She saw people who wrote, painted, acted, living fully and intensely every day. Even the professed idlers whom she met seemed to hold their fingers on the throb of life around them.In the streets—she had been but little in London before—she saw things strange and fascinating—things she had read about, dreamed of, painted, and yet not understood. She was appalled by her ignorance, the narrow gauge of her sympathies. What did all this restless life in the great city mean, its wild cries and passions that struck upon her tightly strung nerves with a deep, mysterious resonance?She filled a sketch-book with the vivid impressions each day brought her, seeking, as her way was, to realise them by tearing them out of herself, and giving them objectivity. A royal academician picked up the book from the corner of a table in the drawing-room, where Clytie, falling easily into the careless ways of the household, had thrown it. He was turning over the pages when Clytie perceived him, and rushed impulsively to him across the room. “ Oh! you mustn’t look at that, Mr. Redgrave. Please don’t!”He looked up at her amusedly. “ Why not? It is rather interesting. Why don’t you learn to draw?” “ What would be the good?” she said. “This suits my purpose.”The other shrugged his shoulders good-humouredly. “ That all depends upon what your purpose is,” he replied. “If you want to become an artist you must train properly for it.”Become an artist! The words haunted her all that night. They opened up before her infinite vistas of possibilities, life in the midst of the world, the knowledge of its greatnesses and its mysteries.In the morning she wrote to him. He invited her to come to his studio and talk over the matter. She asked Mrs. Farquharson to accompany her, but her hostess was engaged at the hour in question. Clyde looked disappointed. The home traditions asserted themselves and prevented her from thinking it possible to go unchaperoned. Mrs. Farquharson divined this and laughed in her bright way. “ Goodness gracious, my dear,” she said, “the man isn’t going to eat you!”So Clytie went alone to the studio to learn her destiny. “ You have great talent,” said the artist, “but it needs cultivation. After two or three years’ severe training you may do something.”Then Clytie asked him the question that had been burning her heart for two days. “ Do you think I shall ever be able to earn my own living?” “ You might do that now, if you chose, and had patience,” he replied. “ How?” “ By book illustrating.” “ But I want to become a great artist.” “ Doubtless. Most of us do. You may if you try hard, and love art for art’s sake. But,” he added, looking at her keenly—“there always is a ‘but,’ Miss Davenant.” “ Why do you say that?” she asked quickly. “ Parce que, as the French say—begging your pardon.”And that was practically the end of the conversation.All this had happened to Clytie three months before Mrs. Blather had discovered the offending picture in Clytie’s attic studio and had carried it to her father. After this foretaste of life the girl wearied more than ever of Durdleham with its soullessness, its stagnation, its prim formulas. A dangerous reaction of spirit set in, leading her to long spells of hopeless melancholy, alternating with outbursts of passionate rebellion. She would stand for hours in the recess of her window gazing over the flat stretch of country, and dreaming strange dreams of the world that lay beyond the dreary horizon—dreams in which sharp reminiscence mingled with fancy in vague, weird shapes. But still she was beginning to realise herself, her needs, her vague cravings. Her passionate desires now flowed into some definite channel—to escape at all costs from Durdleham, and consequently to enter that free world of art the glimpse of which had enchanted her.The scenes between her sisters and herself were of daily occurrence. The narrower, gentler women were shocked at her wilfulnesses, her unladylike behaviour; she was revolted to her soul at the pettiness and sordidness of the disputes. Existence at Durdleham had become impossible. “ For God’s sake, Grade, let me go away from here,” she cried one day, “or I shall hate you—and I want to love you if I can. Let me go to London. Auntie will take me in. Oh, my God! I shall go mad in this place among you.”And Mrs. Blather, for the sake of her own tranquillity and the reputation of the family, made up her mind that Clytie should have her desire and that Durdleham should know her no more. And in the end Mrs. Blather gained her father’s consent to the arrangement; but the old man looked upon Clytie almost as a lost soul.

CHAPTER II.

When the eager young soul starts out unaided to solve the riddle of life, it meets with many paradoxes that admit of no solution, and many sordid simplicities that only unfamiliarity made it regard as enigmas. Despair in the one instance and disgust in the other not unfrequently drive it into a hopeless pessimism, in which inaction seems to be the least pain. Or else the soul bruises itself in vain against the mocking bars, shrinks in loathing from the disveiled corruption, and flies back to the unavailing aids that it spurned aforetime. It is cast in the valley of the shadow of death which only the stout-hearted can pass through unshaken.

The multitude stands by the formulas that profess to solve the eternal problem. It follows them blindly, like the schoolboy who cares not whether they are right or wrong, or whether the answer is conclusive. So long as there is an answer of some sort its mind is easy. But there are earnester inquirers whom these formulas do not satisfy—who see that they are followed for their own sake, that they never can lead to any conclusions. The soul, now of a people, now of an individual, rebels; it rejects the formulas; it starts from the first principles of being, asserting fiercely its individuality, its inalienable right to seek after truth according to its own methods. These are prejudiced. All great action must be. Because a system is rotten and incomplete the perfervid spirit judges that every factor must be false. It misses the fact that every great human system contains elemental truths of vital importance, without which it must fall in its struggle. And at last, when the forces of endeavour are well nigh spent, it finds the key of the great enigma inwrapped in a greater one still, in the eternal tragedy of things.

It was with this burning protest against formulas that

Clytie entered into the world. They had been presented to her in their smug complacency as solving all mysteries human and divine. She had seen them worshipped as fetiches, and her soul revolted against the futile idolatry. She was too young to examine them carefully, to see that the sacrosanctity of some was miserably justified by human experience. She spurned them all, and she plunged into the waters of Life, a rudderless bark in search of the unknown.

She spent two years in study at the Slade School in University College, living under the protection of her aunt, who had a house in Russell Square. The training was severe and at times irksome. But she learned strict academical rules of drawing, in spite of her repugnance to the stern coldness of the antique. After her term of hard training was over she went for a year into a painter’s studio and learned colour and painting from the live model.

They were years of probation, as Clytie well knew, and they brought her lessons in self-restraint, both in art and in the conduct of life. Her aunt, Miss Davenant, was shrewder and broader-minded than her brother, having lived more in the whirl of humanity, but the formulas of Durdleham were ranged as household gods upon her hearthstone, and Clytie, out of pure self-interest, was bound to show them outward respect. To compensate, however, for this, Clytie found in her student life many experiences, as she had found during her continental trip, with which she could fill her heart without violating her aunt’s Lares and Penates.

She seldom went to Durdleham. She had an odd feeling that she was in disgrace there for having wished to leave it. Besides, both Mrs. Blather and Janet, as is the inconsequent way of such women, spoke tauntingly of her gay life in town, and contrasted it enviously with their country dulness. And then, too, her father was always querulous, complaining, not of her absence from home, but of her dissimilarity to her sisters.

“ My dear papa,” she said one day, “I could no more be like them than they could be like me.”

“ You might if you had tried,” said the old man.

Clytie looked hopelessly out of window. What possible reply could be made?

The happiest, most expansive hours that Clytie spent during these three years were in Harley Street with the Farquharsons. At first her aunt was rather averse to a continuance of the intimacy. Although she had kept up a visiting acquaintance with the Farquharsons since their return from Switzerland, and liked them both personally, she was conscious of an unfamiliar atmosphere in their house. The instinctive shrinking from the unknown made her seek to draw Clytie back with her towards the security of her own accustomed circle. But eventually, when she saw that the girl, to whom she had grown sincerely attached, found real happiness in going to Harley Street, she withdrew her tentative restrictions altogether. Perhaps she read deeper into the girl’s heart than either was conscious of, and realised that in the Farquharsons’ society Clytie found a relief from the strain of everyday life with her, which otherwise might have been unbearable.

The conditions of the household in Harley Street were favourable to the development of unceremonious intimacy. Mrs. Farquharson herself was bred in that strange London world we call Bohemia. Her father, long since dead, had been a journalist, a hack story-writer, a maker of plays, sometimes editor of a smart weekly, at others acting manager of a provincial company. Like most men of his type he spent his money as fast as he earned it, and when work came to a temporary standstill drew upon the prospects of his next success. His daughter Caroline had grown up in cheerful familiarity with this hand to mouth, makeshift existence. She had been called upon so often from her earliest childhood to condone the faults of her father and those of his intimates, who were men of much the same mould as himself, that a general habit of indulgence became natural to her. Folly seemed so inherent a quality in humanity that not to smile tolerantly, even though reprovingly, upon it was with her an impossibility. The lowering of moral tone that might have resulted from this mental attitude, and from a continuance of the same conditions of life, was prevented by her early marriage with a man of assured income and position. Her father died shortly afterwards and her connection with the seamy side of Bohemianism was thoroughly broken off. But the ingrained habits of freedom and carelessness still remained. She could never learn to be methodical, systematic. She had an inherited dread of account-books, household rules, fixed hours for meals, and appointed places for every domestic article. It was fortunate for her that she had married a man who worshipped her, and himself shared her distaste for rigidly organised life. His means had placed him beyond the necessity of working for his livelihood, and so the free life in a home where he could work, idle, eat, and receive his friends at any hour of the day or night was as much to his own taste as to that of his wife.

It was impossible that such a house should not possess a charm for those to whom the Farquharsons gave their friendship. The absence of formality encouraged expansiveness and individuality. There was a tacit understanding that one had a right not only to oneself, but to the appreciation of oneself by the host and hostess. It was this that Clytie had felt during her first visit, and it attracted her more and more to them as time went on. Gradually the house became a second home to her, and Mrs. Farquharson a friend such as she had never known before. She could go to her for strength and comfort during her fits of depression when the time seemed out of joint, and she did not in the least seem called upon to set it right. The restraints of strict draughtsmanship, academic modelling and grouping, chafed her as her simple arithmetic had done at school. She longed to throw them off and to plunge back into her old artistic wilfulnesses. But these occasions generally coincided with fresh sensations of restraint in her home life, and she was wise enough to appreciate the fact.

During this period an incident occurred in her life, giving it fresh colour and helping her to realise herself more fully. Her girlhood had been far removed from the lax sphere of idle flirtation in which many girls are brought up. The young men of Durdleham, who might have been attracted towards her by her beauty, were frozen by her scarcely veiled impatience at their society.

The dominant impulse towards active search after life had swayed her to the exclusion of any less powerful motive, and it had scarcely yet occurred to her that her personality might interest and possibly influence others. She was too absorbed in her work, in her dimly shadowed yet ever-haunting plans for the future, in the individualities round her, in the foretaste of that full sense of living, in the stirring objectivity of London life, to dwell at all earnestly on subjective matters and to devote much attention to self-analysis. It is only when the question, “How do others affect me?” ceases to interest that the other question, “How does my personality affect others?” begins to assume a paramount importance. The possibility of a man falling in love with her was a factor as yet absent from her scheme of practical life.

She learned that such an event had occurred from Mrs. Farquharson. She had gone to her one Monday morning, depressed, out of tune, to seek consolation.

“ Oh, why am I not a man?” she exclaimed petulantly. “Why can’t I live by myself, go where I like, and see what I want to see?”

Her friend laughed good-humouredly.

“ You want to do too much at once, my dear. The world’s your oyster, as ancient Pistol said, and you would force it open with one wrench. As for wishing to be a man, you are by no means original. Lots of girls say that, but when they grow older they think it’s just as well for them that they are women.”

“ What on earth’s the good of being a woman?” asked Clytie, with rather unnecessary emphasis.

One of her studio companions had asked her to join a party at a theatre, and her aunt had demurred on the ground that ladies ought not to go to that particular house. It showed a certain knowledge of the world on the old lady’s part, but Clytie did not realise it, and although she accepted the decision with good grace, it fretted her. These trivial things fret even the wisest amongst us quite as much as the important ones do.

Mrs. Farquharson did not reply, but continued placidly her usual Monday morning’s occupation of putting her music in order, while Clytie watched her from the long rocking-chair where she was sitting, her hands clasped behind her head.

“ What’s the good of being a woman when one has to pass half one’s life shut up in darkness? It’s bad enough being a human being as it is, and having to sleep the other half.”

“ How old are you, my dear?” asked Mrs. Farquharson, looking at a song.

“ You know,” replied Clytie. “Twenty.”

“ Then how would you like to be a young man of twenty—or even two-and-twenty? How would you like to be young Beaumont, for instance? Do you think he knows so very much more than you do?”

“ He’s such a boy,” said Clytie.

“ And you, my dear, are such a girl,” said Mrs. Farquharson, coming up behind her chair and smoothing her cheeks. “But you are many years older than he is—and likely to remain so. Do you know why we women like to be women? Because we see so many things that men would give the eyes of their heads to know. Hasn’t it ever struck you that we are familiar with a side of life that is almost forever hidden from men? And as for that particular side that men have exclusively to themselves, it is neither very pretty nor comfortful.”

“ I suppose that is why men stop talking when one goes into the smoking-room,” said Clytie. “You hear shouts of laughter outside the door, and you think they must be having an awfully good time, and when you appear in the doorway they seem to pull themselves together, and one or two always look red and sheepish.”

“ I should advise you to read the story of Bluebeard,” said Mrs. Farquharson.

“ You are just as bad as the rest,” cried Clytie, half laughing and half vexed. “I never thought it of you. That’s what I have always been told: Never try to find out what you don’t know. Always remain in a state of blissful ignorance. Men are superior beings, and a good little girl ought to accept her position with meekness.”

“ I could a tale unfold,” said her friend, “but I won’t. It is too early for you. If you want to make experiments on your own account there is young Beaumont for you. He will tell you the sum total of his knowledge in ten minutes.”

“ Do you know, I like him,” said Clytie, leaving the main track of the conversation. “He always looks so clean, and his clothes fit him so well, and he is so serviceable. He always seems to be trying to make the best of himself, since God has done so little for him. And it’s very plucky of him to try to improve on the Almighty.”

“ I would not like him too much.”

“ Why?”

“ My poor Clytie! You haven’t even got the elements of woman’s knowledge yet. Can’t you see why Beaumont wears those very chaste ties and those wonderfully shiny boots, and does errands all over London for you? Oh, dear!”

“ Do you mean that he——?”

Mrs. Farquharson looked at her quizzically and nodded.

“ Therefore I would not like him too much.”

Obeying a first impulse, Clytie burst out laughing. It seemed so ridiculous. Beaumont was a good-looking, fresh-faced young fellow of two-and-twenty, a distant relation of the Farquharsons, and a habitué of the house. She had met him there many times and had begun to feel quite friendly towards him. Besides, he had fetched and carried for her in the most useful way. She had never thought of his falling in love with her. As he was the last man she herself would have thought of falling in love with, she found the event ludicrous.

She stopped laughing suddenly, and crimsoned to her hair; then rushed impulsively up to Mrs. Farquharson, and put her arm round her waist.

“ I am sorry; forgive me. What must you think of me! I could not help it, indeed I couldn’t. You put me in such a new light before myself. And, dear Mrs. Farquharson, I do so want you to see the best side of me.”

“ My dear girl,” said her friend, “you don’t suppose that with your face and your nature you are going to pass through life without having men falling in love with you! You see what a lot you have to learn. You want to have a man’s experiences before you have passed through the elementary ones of a woman.”

“ And Mr. Beaumont—what shall I do?”

“ Oh! don’t fret yourself about him. He will get over it. He has no end of this sort of thing to go through before his life is up. It will do him good.” Clytie had not much time to map out any fixed plan of treatment of her would-be lover, for he met her an afternoon or two afterwards outside University College, where he had been waiting for her, and pleaded that she would walk a little way up towards the Regent’s Park, as the afternoon was fine.

Clytie looked at him and hesitated.

“ Only just a little way. I have something I must tell you.”

“ Perhaps you had best never tell it,” said Clytie.

The red-waistcoated gate porter behind them beamed on them smilingly. He had seen something of youthful love in his professional career.

“ I must, whatever happens,” replied the young fellow. “I know it’s wrong to ask you to walk in the street with me, but I don’t know when I shall get another chance.”

“ I don’t see anything wrong about it,” said Clytie. “I will go with you wherever you wish.”

So they wandered up Gower Street and the Euston Road into the park, and there, for the first time in her life, Clytie heard a man confess his love for her and ask her to marry him. He was only a boy after all, but he was in great earnest. Clytie felt humbled, almost guilty, and yet a great, unknown pleasure thrilled through her. Although she knew that the sooner and more summarily the interview was brought to an end the better for both herself and him, she could scarcely resist the temptation of allowing him to pour out the fulness of his boyish love for her.

She suddenly found herself listening to the sound but not the meaning of his words, her senses filled with the sweetness of the new sensations and the pure May sunlight that flooded the trees and the gay flower-bed opposite the bench where they were sitting. Then she realised her situation, and in a few kind words, harder to speak than she would have expected, dismissed him.

And that was the end of the matter. He went off whither young men in his predicament generally betake themselves, and Clytie returned slowly home to Russell Square.

When she had reached her own room she went deliberately up to the glass and scanned her features. Then she laughed a strange, contented little laugh, and taking off her hat and gloves, went downstairs to tea. She had advanced several steps along the road to knowledge.

Three years! How quickly they passed! How sure yet dimly working were their influences! If they were years of probation and self-restraint for Clytie, they also brought with them softening influences. Hitherto her life had been one of revolt and harsh, crude judgments that had turned away friendship and had left her solitary. Mutual misconception and misunderstanding had crushed sisterly love. Her heart had never been touched by real affection. Now she had friends, real ones, in the Far-quharsons whom she could love for their own sakes, and pleasant, sympathetic ones in her companions at the Slade School and at the studio. She learned, too, the sweetness of active protection and helpfulness. Her aunt, though somewhat stronger-fibred than the rest of the Davenants, possessed their essential physical characteristics. Her health, which had been failing for some years, gradually gave way altogether. During the few months of her last illness she depended entirely upon Clytie for care and tenderness. It was a new, strange experience for the girl. She learned to love the faded elderly lady who bore her sufferings so calmly, so cheerfully. Both Mrs. Blather and Janet offered to come and nurse her, but Miss Davenant would have none but Clytie. If this period of selflessness and sacrifice had lasted, who knows what sweet effacement of individuality might have resulted? Who knows into what channels of pity and sublime endeavours of mercy the girl’s full, ardent nature might have been directed? But the high gods had ordained otherwise. Miss Davenant died, and Clytie again found herself with the unknown destiny before her that had to be worked out unaided.

It was only after the first outburst of grief that she realised this fully. She had gone back to Durdleham, with a new range of feelings freshly revealed. Her sisters she found were gentle, quiet women like her aunt, narrower perhaps, with thin currents of old prejudice still running through them, but still lovable and sympathetic in her sorrow. They welcomed her back like a lost sheep to the fold. Never had her home life seemed so peaceful, comfortful; London was scarcely mentioned, and her sisters agreed between themselves that Clytie’s absence from home was an episode of the past, never to recur.

But time wears and effaces the deepest intaglio of impression, even that of a young girl’s first knowledge of death and eternal loss. Gradually the quietude of eventless life, as the need for it wore away, grew wearisome, oppressive, and the old restless cravings began to gnaw at her heart. The breach that death had closed slowly widened again, so gradually that not till it was fully appreciable did the sisters recognise it. The formulas seemed narrower, more lifeless than ever. She had viewed dimly the potentialities of life, and her soul burned within her with a fiercer hunger. Almost against her will she revolted finally.

“ What is this that Janet has been telling me,” said Mrs. Blather one morning, “about your wanting to go back to London? You cannot be in earnest, Clytie?”

Clytie looked at her sister rather sadly, tears springing into her eyes.

“ You have been very good to me since I have come back, Gracie, and I have learned to love you more than I did before—much more. But can’t you understand, dear, that if I am to go on loving you I must go away?”

“ I can’t see it at all,” replied Mrs. Blather. “If we have got on so nicely together these last few months, why can’t we continue? Janet and I are willing to give you all in our power to make you happy.”

“ Ah! but don’t you see that what I want is out of your power to give?” said Clytie. “Don’t think I am wicked and ungrateful. If a man wants five pounds, he is grateful to anyone who gives him one; but that does not lessen his need of the other four. Now the other four pounds are not to be got in Durdleham, Gracie, and I must have them.”

“ You should learn content, Clytie,” said her sister. “We have all to put up with our lot in life.”

Clytie checked an impulse of impatience at the platitude, and answered with great gentleness of voice and manner:

“ This is not my lot in life, dear. It is quite different. You and Janet can bear it, because your natures crave this tranquillity. Mine craves movement, excitement, strange faces. Oh, Gracie, it is no use talking—I must go away, or I shall begin to hate Durdleham as I used to do. There is nothing for me to do here. I am too bad for it, perhaps. I don’t know. I can’t explain it to you; you have never felt it.”

“ My dear Clytie, that is all nonsense,” said Mrs. Blather, who prided herself, above all things, on being a woman of common sense. “As a matter of fact, you can’t go to London, because you would have no one to live with, and you would only have your hundred a year to support you, as papa has lost a great deal of money lately and can hardly afford to give you an allowance. When your aunt was alive it was a different thing. The whole idea of going to live alone in London is silly. So there’s an end of it.”

Mrs. Blather went on with her sewing, with mingled feelings of content at having done her duty and disappointment in the failure of promise of reform in Clytie. She would have judged her sister mercifully had she been able. She was naturally a gentle woman, full of kindness. But her canons of duty would not allow her to encourage or condone wilfulness, caprice, and a tendency to wrong-doing. She earnestly believed it was for Clytie’s good to stay in Durdleham. The girl’s wider needs she could not understand.

Clytie turned from the hearthrug, where she had been standing, to the drawing-room window, and looked out blankly at the rain. Her young face was set rather hard; her lips quivered a little; her heart beat quicker than usual. A struggle was taking place within her—the struggle between the girl and the woman. She felt that the great moment of her life had come. She must choose. Which should it be: the dazzling light with its weird shadows of things unseen, or the gray, easeful glimmer in which the familiar realities cast no shadow? Which should it be: daughterly duty and maidenly retirement, or the sundering of home ties forever and going out, one woman, to battle with the world?

She turned away from the window at last and called to her sister. The latter looked up and was filled with foreboding as she saw the girl’s pale face.

“ Yes. What is the matter, Clytie?”

“ I have made up my mind, Gracie,” she said a little huskily. “I am going to London to live by myself. I can share lodgings with one of the girls I know at the Slade School. There will be no difficulty. I can earn money; I have already earned a little. As for mamma’s money, I am of age now, and it is my own to do what I like with it—as you and Janet do. Let this be an end of the discussion, Gracie. I am going.”

CHAPTER III.

Few people, in an outburst of enthusiasm, would select the King’s Road, Chelsea, as an ideal locality to reside in. It is an important thoroughfare, no doubt, but it lacks nobility and distinction. There are isolated, quiet spots in it, with houses lying back from the road; and from the upper windows of favoured residences one can obtain a view over Yeitch’s or Bull’s extensive hothouses, and catch dim shadows of great tropical palms and a mellowed dash of brilliant red and yellow. There are others which look over Portman Square or St. Luke’s Churchyard. But on the other hand, there are long stretches of dreary shops and factories, grit and general uncomeliness. Without being squalid, it has a careworn, untidy appearance, as if it was far too much harassed with the petty worries and strain of workaday life to think of cheerful adornment. Few people, except errand boys whose sense either of aesthetics or duty is usually undeveloped, saunter casually along the King’s Road. A stranger tries to get out of it as fast as he can; a frequenter has his business to attend to. Fashion does not pass along it, except on tearing drags bound for Hurlingham. It is essentially a small bourgeois part of London, with all the small bourgeois unpretence and honest, if somewhat dismal, solidity.

It was in the middle of such a dreary stretch of the road, some half mile west of Sloane Square, that Clytie found a lodging. The fact that a green-grocer’s shop, owned by the landlord of the house, occupied the ground floor was compensated, in a measure, by the existence of a small studio at the back, on the first floor, originally constructed by a struggling photographer, who had since worked his way upwards into a more fashionably perfumed atmosphere. One of Clytie’s favourite fellow-students, Winifred Marchpane, who lived in Lower Sloane Street, and whose family obtained their potatoes and salads from Mr. Gurkins, had recommended the establishment, and offered to share with her the expenses of the studio. The cheapness of the rooms suited Clytie’s modest purse, and the prospect of pleasant companionship in the studio was an additional attraction. It is true that the acrid smell of the potatoes, when the side door from the shop on to the private entrance lobby was left open, ascended the stairs, together with a vague odour of cooking, bearing upwards, as it were, on savoury breath the disputes of Mrs. Gurkins with the shopboy and the cries of her apparently ever-youthful progeny. The incessant rumble, too, of omnibuses, drays, and furniture vans, and the peculiarly aggressive rattle of tradesmen’s carts, shook the floor and the windows and shivered the lustres of the chandelier. There were many drawbacks to elegant life, but Clytie, borrowing some philosophy from a talk with Mrs. Farquharson, proceeded to disregard those she could not eliminate. The sitting-room, when the door was shut and the curtains drawn of an evening, was cosy enough. The pictures, nicknacks, hangings, and other minor accessories of furnished apartments Clytie had returned to Mrs. Gurkins’ keeping, on the plea that she scarcely had room for her own—which was true; and, by some miraculous art of persuasion, she had induced Mr. Gurkins to remove the nerve-shattering chandelier, on the ground that she could not work by gaslight—which was not true. She hung thick curtains over the door to keep out noise and odour, broke up the rigidity of the furniture by screens, small tables, and plants, and painted a long panel for the old cottage piano that made it look fresh and companionable. When all the arrangements were completed the room appeared dainty and homelike, bearing, however, here and there, in bold notes of colour, folds of drapery, and odd bits of semi-impressionist painting, a peculiar impress of its tenant’s personality.

She was living at last the life she had so passionately longed for. There was not a human being to control her actions, not a conventionality to check the utterance of her thoughts. During her early days here she almost felt tempted to hang up her latchkey over the mantelpiece as a glorious symbol of liberty. It seemed not only to serve to give her entrance to her own modest home, but to be the power that would unlock the heart of the great London that lay before her.

From the first she had little difficulty in finding work. Dealers bought small pictures and gave her orders. She also pleased a firm of publishers to whom she had gone with letters of introduction and specimens of her draughtsmanship, and obtained work in the way of book and magazine illustrating. Her earnings were not large, but there was the promise of success to come. At the end of two years her income was large enough to have enabled her to move from the King’s Road into a more refined locality; but she had grown accustomed to its noise and rattle, and to the hurried, joyless stream of life that flowed along it day by day. And Mrs. Gurkins understood her tastes and habits, a quality in a landlady appreciated by women as well as men. So she stayed on.

She read widely during these years, learned much. Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four a woman is capable of vast assimilation of ideas. They can flow into the freshly opened, unpolluted channels of her being, as yet unclogged by the refuse of sorrows and wearinesses. Her rejection of the old formulas, and the paramount necessity of gaining knowledge wherewith to provide herself substitutes, checked in her any impulse towards moral or artistic idealism. She read deeply, instinctively seeking after the roots of life, the elemental passions that shake our nature, be its superstructure never so delicately complex. The dawning knowledge half frightened, half attracted her. The barbaric feminine in her struggled to escape into solitude. With fluttering eyelids downcast it recoiled from the idea of passion as yet unawakened responsively within her. But the higher needs of modernity constrained her to a just, resolute system of inquiry. She learned that there are deeper laws regulating our being than those which could be enunciated at Durdleham tea-tables, where the ingrained habit of non-recognition of them restricted life within narrowest limits, and put, as it were, a prohibition tax upon exoteric sympathy.

At four-and-twenty Clytie was a woman—emotional, impulsive, eager to taste of any new experience. The old rebellious habit of mind had developed into a frank independence. Her step was elastic, her bearing confident. Her life was full and happy.

“ I am glad I am a woman now,” she said to Mrs. Farquharson. “I seem to have all the advantages of both sexes.”

“ Wait till you’re married, my dear,” replied her friend.

Mrs. Farquharson was fond of the use of affectionate irritants. They are often valuable preservatives of friendship.

Clytie laughed.

“ I suppose I shall marry some day. I don’t want to end up by leading half a life; but I want to have two or three years more of this. I must play at being a man a little longer.”

“ A pretty sort of man!” said Mrs. Farquharson, resting her chin on her hand and looking at Clytie with amused eyes. “You are the most deliciously feminine young woman I know. Look at your frock and your hair.”

Judging by outward appearances Mrs. Farquharson’s criticism was correct. Clytie had the artistic sense in dress. It was like most of her other artistic impulses, with the personal note dominant—soft textures, falling easily into folds, quiet in tone, dark grays, subdued half shades of yellows, suddenly brightened by a small, daring flash of colour at throat or bosom. Lace, with its creamy, clinging softness delighted her, and she wore it defiantly, with a certain sense of triumph that she was perhaps the only girl in England who could wear it with faultless taste.

She was of medium height, but her slender, fully formed figure and its erect carriage gave her an air of tallness. Her head set well on her shoulders, and a habit of holding it back, with the chin pointing upwards, free of the throat, added to the impression of young, fearless womanhood. Her eyes were dark blue, wide apart, yet sunk in finely moulded orbits. A light of humour playing in their depths, together with a soft modelling of the nose contours beneath them, atoned for an impression of hardness and sensuousness that would have been given by the ripe, full lips with their little curl of disdain. Her face was rounded delicately—that much she inherited from the Davenants—but a faint flush of colour showed the buoyant young blood within, just as her deep red hair, with a thousand lights dancing in it, attested the rich, vigorous strain that had asserted itself in her. She was proud, womanlike, of this hair, and had a way of dressing it in bewildering confusion.

Her Slade School friend, Winifred Marchpane, continued to share the studio with her. At first she had been a little afraid of Clytie, whose bold judgments and fearless expression of opinion were not qualified always to attract a timorous, shrinking nature. But gradually the stronger personality had overpowered the weaker and bound it to itself by unbreakable bonds. A great friendship had thus arisen between the girls, based on Winifred’s side on enthusiastic admiration, almost worship, and on Clytie’s on a tender feeling of love and protection.

Winifred was one of a large family, her father, a retired officer in the army with limited income. Two of her sisters were governesses, earning their livelihood miles away from home. Another one took charge of the smaller members of the household. Winifred, who had a dainty talent for the painting of still life, supported herself, living at home and paying her share of the household expenses. She was a little, gentle creature, with dark hair, and with a rich colour showing beneath a brown cheek. Her deep brown eyes had a doglike trustfulness in them, and a steadfastness withal such as makes the heroine. A girl of few moods, few caprices. Her work was always beautifully, conscientiously finished. She always loved it, always found in it the same quiet charm. There was no element of passion in it to set jarring the strings of futile endeavour. A fine sense of colour and gradation and subtle curve, a supreme delicacy of touch—that was her sole artistic stock in trade, and she never sought to stray beyond the limits imposed. She had had a little picture accepted at the Academy, hung in a far, far corner—a bunch of Maréchal Niel roses, full-blown, in a Venetian glass vase of exquisitely veined transparencies—a perfect little picture, sweet and pure, like herself.

It was a cold March day. The sun shone cheerfully through the drawn white blinds of the studio skylight, but an east wind blowing outside came in through the cracks and defied the blaze of the fire in the stove.

“ You are quite blue with cold,” said Winifred, laying down mahl-stick and palette. “Here, put on this wrap. Why don’t you take more care of yourself?”

“ I never thought of it,” said Clytie, shivering a little and accepting contentedly the wrap and a caress. “I was sketching out quite a history of that boy who has just left.”

Winifred drew a stool to Clytie’s chair near the fire and took up her position upon it—a favourite one with her, as she could have both the moral solace of sitting at Clytie’s feet, and the physical comfort of resting her head in Clytie’s lap.

“ I hope he won’t bring all kinds of horrible people into the house—burglars, you know, like Oliver Twist,” she added vaguely.

“ I suppose it is rather rash picking up a model out of the streets. But he is just the boy I wanted to give character to the group. I was going to paint in one out of my own head.”

“ I don’t know how you get all those street types out of your head, Clytie. I wish I could do it.”

“ I would like to see you try, you silly child,” said Clytie, laughing. “Your street arabs would look like stray Cupids hastily huddled up in old clothes by a shocked and modest policeman!”

“ I did not mean that; you know I didn’t. What I meant was—I wish I could paint without models. I don’t think I could paint a common flat leaf without having it before me. As for painting that”—and she pointed to a basket standing by her easel, overflowing with anemones, snowdrops, and violets obtained that morning by Mr. Gurkins from Covent Garden—“without a copy, I might just as soon think of flying.”

“ You are an artist, Winnie, and love your art for its own sake. I am not quite so sure that I do, now. To have to finish all the thousand little convolutions of those bells would drive me raving mad. I should like to have a ghost as sculptors do, only mine would do the finishing and put in all the nuisance of detail. That’s why I can get on without models. It saves time. I can bring home a face with me from the streets, and I can paint it in rapidly, and then I am done. I suppose I oughtn’t to be, but Burrowes seems satisfied. He says he has got quite a ‘line’ in my pictures—the correct ones—and is thinking of raising the price. I am sure that man has been a linen-draper.”

“ If you could remember the boy’s face why do you bring him here?” asked Winifred. “I only want to know why you want him so particularly, dear,” she added, raising her chin and looking upwards at Clytie.

The boy had been ragged and uncared-for, not exactly a street urchin, but on a vague borderland of respectability, between the newspaper arab and the errand boy.—a hybrid with the vices of many strains.

“ Do you really want to know, Winnie?” said Clytie. “Perhaps you’ll be shocked. However, you’ll have to know sooner or later: I am going to make a picture of him on my own account, just a little bit more fantastic than he is, and call him a—an—oh, dear! what shall I call him?”

“ An elf?”

“ Good gracious, no. What have I to do with elves and fairies and that sort of thing? He is the son of Cophetua—supposing the king had not married the beggar maid.”

“ Then why not the son of any other king?”

“ Why not, indeed?” said Clytie drily. “Or of any other beggar maid?”

“ Oh!” said Winifred, looking into the fire.

And then after a pause:

“ What makes you think that?”

“ Did you see his mother? I did. Such a stupid-looking, red-faced woman. I think she said she was a charwoman by profession. There are generations of drudgery in her face, whereas in Jack’s there is vigour and intelligence—something so different; he must have some better strain of blood in him than she and a husband of her class can have given him. Don’t you think so, dear?”

“ He’s a very pretty boy,” replied Winifred, “but, oh, he is so dirty and”—with a shudder—“so animal.”

“ Well, he fascinates me,” said Clytie meditatively. “I am going to paint one of my wildest pictures—all for my own self—and a bit for you if you like, Winnie.” Winnie accepted this tribute of affection with a little flush of pleasure, although Clytie’s “own” pictures seldom gave her unqualified æsthetic delight, and turned her face towards Clytie, who laughed in her frank way.

“ Don’t look at me with those great eyes of yours, child! You make me angry for you. They are just the sort of eyes that make women miserable. You must not trust in people like that, believe me.”

“ I trust them when they are good like you, dear.”

“ Oh, but you mustn’t. Don’t you know I am the wickedest girl going—always thinking of the most dreadful things? Look at the wall. How can you love anybody that can do these silly things?”

She pointed to a series of grotesque charcoal caricatures on the studio wall. She had been dissatisfied a day or two back with a picture she had been engaged on for a month, and in a fit of wilfulness had daubed it out and then proceeded to make a cruel, fantastic travesty of it on the wall.

“ You wanted your tea, dear, just as you do now,” replied Winifred.

This tea hour was Winifred’s great delight. At home, on account of the children, they had to sit round the dining table and butter their own thick slices of bread and drink out of substantial breakfast cups. In the studio the girls had provided a dainty little afternoon tea equipage, and Mrs. Gurkins always cut thin bread and butter from a fancy loaf. Generally it was Winifred who poured out the tea, but to-day Clytie busied herself with the cups, thus making some slight amends, perhaps, for having shocked Winifred. Women are full of these odd feminine impulses, and other women understand them. Men don’t.

They sat talking, as they usually did, over their tea, and long afterwards, until it was time for Winifred to go home. As they were taking leave of each other on the landing a man sprang up the stairs, checked himself, and raised a slouch hat as he passed them and vanished up the next flight. He was a fresh-faced man, with a brown and tawny beard; tawny ends, too, to his moustaches; bright gray eyes flashing humourously as he passed the girls. His dress was careless, loose and unfashionable, yet it was marked with a certain individuality.

“ Who is that?” Winifred whispered when the last foot of the ascending figure had disappeared.

“ That’s another protest,” said Clytie—“a better one. He has the courage of his convictions.”

“ What do you mean, Clytie?”

“ Well, can’t you recognise a protest when you see one?”

“ Oh, Clytie, don’t tease and puzzle me,” cried Winifred, giving her friend’s arm a little shake. “Do you know him?”

“ Of course not. How should I? But Mrs. Gurkins was telling me about him only this morning. His name is Kent. He seems to frighten the life out of her, and therefore I say he is a protest. Now you know, so run away home.”

When Winifred had reached the street door Clytie leaned over the banisters and called after her.

“ Winnie! I must have been in a sweet temper this afternoon.”

“ Of course, dear. Why do you say so?”

“ Because you have left your basket of anemones for me to take care of!”