WHERE LOVE IS

She looked him full in the face, with the stony calm of the fashionable young woman accustomed to take excellent care of herself. Her companion met her stare in whimsical confusion. Even so ingenuous a being as Jimmie Padgate could not tell a girl he had met for the first time that she was beautiful, adorable, and graced with divine qualities above all women, and that intimate acquaintance with her must be the startling glory of a lifetime.

“If I had known you for ages,” he replied prudently, “I should have mentioned your name to Morland King.”

“Are you such friends then?”

“Fast friends: we were at school together, and as I was a lonely little beggar I used to spend many of my holidays with his people. That is how I knew Mrs. Deering in short frocks.”

“It's odd, then, that I have n't met you about before,” said the girl, giving him a more scrutinising glance than she had hitherto troubled to bestow upon him. A second afterwards she felt that her remark might have been in the nature of an indiscretion, for her companion had not at all the air of a man moving in the smart world to which she belonged. His dress-suit was old and of lamentable cut; his shirt-cuffs were frayed; a little bone stud, threatening every moment to slip the button-hole, precariously secured his shirt-front. His thin, iron-grey hair was untidy; his moustache was ragged, innocent of wax or tongs or any of the adventitious aids to masculine adornment. His aspect gave the impression, if not of poverty, at least of narrow means and humble ways of life. Although he had sat next her at dinner, she had paid little attention to him, finding easier entertainment in her conversation with King on topics of common interest, than in possible argument with a strange man whom she heard discussing the functions of art and other such head-splitting matters with his right-hand neighbour. Indeed, her question about Ranelagh when she found him by her side, later, in the drawing-room was practically the first she had addressed to him with any show of interest.

She hastened to repair her maladroit observation by adding before he could reply,—

“That is rather an imbecile thing to say considering the millions of people in London. But one is apt to talk in an imbecile manner after a twelve hours' day of hard racket in the season. Don't you think so? One's stock of ideas gets used up, like the air at the end of a dance.”

“Not if you keep your soul properly ventilated,” he answered.

The words were, perhaps, not so arresting as the manner in which they were uttered. Norma Hardacre was startled. A little shutter in the back of her mind seemed to have flashed open for an elusive second, and revealed a prospect wide, generous, alive with free-blowing airs. Then all was dark again before she could realise the vision. She was disconcerted, and in a much more feminine way than was habitual with her she glanced at him again. This time she lost sight of the poor, untidy garments, and found a sudden interest in the man's kind, careworn face, and his eyes, wonderfully blue and bright, set far apart in the head, that seemed to look out on the world with a man's courage and a child's confidence. She was uncomfortably conscious of being in contact with a personality widely different from that of her usual masculine associates. This her training and habit of mind caused her to resent; despising the faint spiritual shock, she took refuge in flippancy.

“I fear our Tobin tubes get choked up in London,” she said with a little laugh. “Even if they did n't they are wretched things, which create draughts; so anyway our souls are free from chills. Look at that woman over there talking to Captain Orton—every one knows he's paymaster-general. A breath of fresh air in Mrs. Chance's soul would give it rheumatic fever.”

The abominable slander falling cynically from young lips brought a look of disapproval into Jimmie Padgate's eyes.

“Why do you say such things?” he asked. “You know you don't believe them.”

“I do believe them,” she replied defiantly. “Why shouldn't one believe the bad things one hears of one's neighbours? It's a vastly more entertaining faith than belief in their virtues. Virtue—being its own reward—is deadly stale to one's friends and unprofitable to oneself.”

“Cynicism seems cheap to-day,” said Jimmie, with a smile that redeemed his words from impertinence. “Won't you give me something of yourself a little more worth having?”

Norma, who was leaning back in her chair fanning herself languidly, suddenly bent forward, with curious animation in her cold face.

“I don't know who you are or what you are,” she exclaimed. “Why should you want more than the ordinary futilities of after-dinner talk?”

“Because one has only to look at you,” he replied, “to see that it must be very easy to get. You have beauty inside as well as outside, and everybody owes what is beautiful and good in them to their fellow-creatures.”

“I don't see why. According to you, women ought to go about like mediaeval saints.”

“Every woman is a saint in the depths of her heart,” said Jimmie.

“You are an astonishing person,” replied Norma.

The conversation ended there, for Morland King came up with Constance Deering: he florid, good-looking, perfectly groomed and dressed, the type of the commonplace, well-fed, affluent Briton; she a pretty, fragile butterfly of a woman. Jimmie rose and was led off to another part of the room by his hostess. King dropped into the chair Jimmie had vacated.

“I see you have been sampling my friend Jimmie Padgate. What do you make of him?”

“I have just told him he was an astonishing person,” said Norma.

“Dear old Jimmie! He's the best fellow in the world,” said King, laughing. “A bit Bohemian and eccentric—artists generally are—”

“Oh, he's an artist?” inquired Norma.

“He just manages to make a living by it, poor old chap! He has never come off, somehow.”

“Another neglected genius?”

“I don't know about that,” replied Morland King in a matter-of-fact way, not detecting the sneer in the girl's tone. “I don't think he's a great swell—I'm no judge, you know. But he has had a bad time. Anyway, he always comes up smiling. The more he gets knocked the more cheerful he seems to grow. I never met any one like him. The most generous, simple-minded beggar living.”

“He must be wonderful to make you enthusiastic,” said Norma.

“Look at him now, talking to the Chance woman as if she were an angel of light.”

Norma glanced across the room and smiled contemptuously.

“She seems to like it. She's preening herself as if the wings were already grown. Connie,” she called to her hostess, who was passing by, “why have you hidden Mr. Padgate from me all this time?”

The butterfly lady laughed. “He is too precious. I can only afford to give my friends a peep at him now and then. I want to keep him all to myself.”

She fluttered away. Norma leaned back and hid a yawn with her fan; then, rousing herself with an effort, made conversation with her companion. Presently another man came up and King retired.

“How is it getting on?” whispered Mrs. Deering.

“Oh, steady,” he replied with his hands in his pockets.

“Lucky man!”

Morland King shrugged his shoulders. “The only thing against it is papa and mamma—chiefly mamma. A Gorgon of a woman!”

“You'll never get a wife to do you more credit than Norma. With that face I wonder she is n't a duchess by now. There was a duke once, but a fair American eagle came and swooped him off under Norma's nose. You see, she's not the sort of girl to give a man much encouragement.”

“Oh, I can't stand a woman who throws herself at your head,” said King, emphatically.

“What a funny way men have nowadays of confessing to the tender passion!” said Mrs. Deering, laughing.

“What would you have a fellow do?” he asked. “Spout blank verse about the stars and things, like a Shakespearean hero?”

“It would be prettier, anyhow.”

“Well, if you will have it, I'm about as hard hit as a man ever was—there!”

“I 'm delighted to hear it,” said his cousin.

A short while afterwards the dinner-party broke up.

“I don't know whether you care to mix with utter worldlings like us, Mr. Padgate,” said Norma, as she bade him good-bye, “but we are always in on Tuesdays.”

“I'll tie him hand and foot and bring him,” said King. “Good-night, old chap. I'm giving Miss Hardacre a lift home in the brougham.”

Before Jimmie could say yes or no, they were gone. He found himself the last.

“You are certainly not going for another hour, Jimmie,” said Mrs. Deering, as he came forward to take leave. “You will sit in that chair and smoke and tell me all about yourself and make me feel good and pretty.”

“Very well,” he assented, laughing. “Turn me out when it's time for me to go.”

It had been the customary formula between them for many years; for Jimmie Padgate lacked the sense of time and kept eccentric hours, and although Connie Deering delighted in her rare confidential chats with him, a woman with a heavy morrow of engagements must go to bed at a reasonable period of the night. She was a woman in the middle thirties, a childless widow after a brief and almost forgotten married life, rich, pleasure-loving, in the inner circle of London society, and possessing the gayest, kindest, most charitable heart in the world. Her friendship with Norma Hardacre had been a thing of recent date.

She had cultivated it first on account of her cousin Morland King; she had ended in enthusiastic admiration.

“It is awfully good of you,” she said, when they were comfortably settled down to talk, “to waste your time with my unintelligent conversation.”

“There's no such thing as unintelligent conversation,” he declared.

“For a man like you there must be.”

“I could hold an intelligent conversation with a rabbit,” said Jimmie.

Norma Hardacre, on arriving home, entered the drawing-room, where her mother was reading a novel.

“Well?” said Mrs. Hardacre, looking up.

Norma threw her white silk cloak over the back of a chair.

“Connie sent her love to you.”

“Is that all you have to say?” asked her mother, sharply. She was a faded woman who had once possessed beauty of a cold, severe type; but the years had pinched and hardened her features, as they had pinched and hardened her heart. Her eyes were of that steel grey which the light of laughter seldom softens, and her smile was but a contraction of the muscles of the lips. Even this perfunctory tribute to politeness which had greeted Norma's entrance vanished at the second question.

“Morland King drove me home. What a difference there is between a private brougham and the beastly things we get from the livery-stable!”

“He has said nothing?”

“Of course not. I should have told you if he had.”

“Whose fault is it?”

Norma made a gesture of impatience. “My fault, if you like. I don't lay traps to catch him. I don't keep him dangling about me, and I don't flatter his vanities or make appeal to his senses, I suppose. I can't do it.”

“Don't behave like a fool, Norma,” said Mrs. Hardacre, rapping her book with a paper-knife. “You have got to marry him. You know you have. Your father and I are coming to the end of things. You ought to have married years ago, and when one thinks of the chances you have missed, it makes one mad. Here have we been pinching and scraping—”

“And borrowing and mortgaging,” Norma interjected.

“—to give you a brilliant position,” Mrs. Hardacre continued, unheeding the interruption, “and you cast all our efforts in our teeth. It's sheer ingratitude. Why you threw over Lord Wyniard I could never make out.”

“You seem to forget that, after all, there is a physical side to marriage,” said Norma, with a little shudder of disgust.

“I hate indelicacy in young girls,” said Mrs. Hardacre, freezingly. “One would think you had been brought up in a public house.”

“Then let us avoid indelicate subjects,” retorted Norma, opening the first book to her hand. “Where is papa?”

“Oh, how should I know?” said Mrs. Hardacre, irritably.

There was silence. Norma pretended to read, but her thoughts, away from the printed lines, caused her face to harden and her lips to curl scornfully. She had been used to such scenes with her mother ever since she had worn a long frock, and that was seven years ago, when she came out as a young beauty of eighteen. The story of financial embarrassment had lost its fine edge of persuasion by overtelling. She had almost ceased to believe in it, and the lingering grain of credence she put aside with the cynical feeling that it was no great concern of hers, so long as her usual round of life went on. She had two hundred a year of her own, all of which she spent in dress, so that in that one particular at least, if she chose to be economical, she was practically independent. Money for other wants was generally procurable, with or without unpleasant dunning of her parents. She lived very little in their home in Wiltshire, a beautiful and stately young woman of fashion being a decorative adjunct to smart country-house parties. In London, if she sighed for a more extensive establishment and a more luxurious style of living, it was what she always had done. She had hated the furnished house or flat and the livery-stable carriage ever since her first season. In the same way she had always considered the omission from her scheme of life of a yacht and a villa at Cannes and diamonds at discretion as a culpable oversight on the part of the Creator. But the sordid makeshift of existence to which she was condemned was not a matter of yesterday. In spite of the financial embarrassments of the maternal fable she had noticed no cutting down of customary expenditure. Her father still played the fool on the stock exchange, her mother still attired herself elaborately and disdained to eat otherwise than à la carte at expensive restaurants, and she, Norma, went whithersoever the smart set drifted her. She had nothing to do with the vulgarity of financial embarrassments.

As to the question of marriage she was as fully determined as her mother that she should make a brilliant match. She had had two or three disappointments—the unwary duke, for instance. On the other hand she had refused eligibles like Lord Wyniard out of sheer caprice.

The only man who had given her a moment's stir of the pulses, a moment's thought of throwing her cap over the windmills, was a young soldier in the Indian Staff Corps. But he belonged to her second season, before she had really seen the world and grasped the inner meaning of life. Besides, her mother had almost beaten her; and in an encounter between the dragon who guarded the gold of her daughter's affections and the young Siegfried, it was the hero that barely escaped destruction; he fled to India for his life. Norma lost all sight and count of him for three years. Then she heard that he had married a schoolfellow of hers and was a month-old father. It was with feelings of peculiar satisfaction and sense of deliverance that she sent her congratulations to him, her love to his wife, and a set of baby shoes to the child. She had cultivated by this time a helpful sardonic humour.

There was now Morland King, within reasonable distance of a proposal. Her experience detected the signs, although little of sentimentality had passed between them. He was young, as marrying men go—a year or two under forty—of good family, fairly good-looking, very well off, with a safe seat in Parliament being kept warm for him by a valetudinarian ever on the point of retirement. Norma meant to accept him. She contemplated the marriage as coldly and unemotionally as King contemplated the seat in Parliament. But through the corrupted tissue of her being ran one pure and virginal thread. She used no lures. She remained chastely aloof, the arts of seduction being temperamentally repugnant to her. Knowledge she had of good and evil (a euphemism, generally, for an exclusive acquaintance with the latter), and she was cynical enough in her disregard of concealment of her knowledge; but she revolted from using it to gain any advantage over a man. At this period of her life she set great store by herself, and though callously determined on marriage condescended with much disdain to be wooed. Her mother, bred in a hard school, was not subtle enough to perceive this antithesis. Hence the constant scenes of which Norma bitterly resented the vulgarity. “We pride ourselves on being women of the world, mother,” she said, “but that does n't prevent our remembering that we are gentlefolk.” Whereat, on one occasion, Mr. Hardacre, in his flustering, feeble way, had told Norma not to be rude to her mother, only to draw upon himself the vials of his wife's anger.

He came in now, during the silence that had fallen on the two women—a short, stout, red-faced man, with a bald head, and a weak chin, and a drooping foxy moustache turning grey. He was bursting with an interminable tale of scandal that he had picked up at his club—a respectable institution with an inner coterie of vapid, middle-aged dullards whose cackle was the terror of half London society. It is a superstition among good women that man is too noble a creature to descend to gossip. Ten minutes in the members' smoking-room of the Burlington Club would paralyse the most scandal-mongering tabby of Bath, Cheltenham, or Tunbridge Wells.

“We were sure she was a wrong 'un from the first,” he explained in a thick, jerky voice to his listless auditors. “And now it turns out that she was in thick with poor Billy Withers, you know, and when Billy broke his neck—that was through another blessed woman—I'll tell you all about her by'm bye—when Billy broke his neck, his confounded valet got hold of Mrs. Jack's letters, and how she paid for 'em's the cream of the story—”

“We need not have that now, Benjamin,” said Mrs. Hardacre, with a warning indication that reverence was due to the young.

“Well, of course that's the end of it,” replied Mr. Hardacre, in some confusion.

But Norma rose with a laugh of hard mockery.

“The valet entered the service of Lord Wyniard, and now there's a pretty little divorce case in the air, with Jack Dugdale as petitioner and Lord Wyniard as corespondent. Are n't you sorry, mother, I did n't marry Wyniard and reform him, and save society this terrible scandal?”

Turning from her disconcerted parents, Norma pulled back the thick curtains from the French window and opened one of the doors.

“What are you doing that for?” cried Mrs. Hardacre irritably, as the cold air of a wet May night swept through the room.

“I'm going to try to ventilate my soul,” said Norma, stepping on to the balcony.

Chapter II—THE FOOL'S WISDOM

LIKE the inexplicable run on a particular number at the roulette-table, there often seems to be a run on some particular phenomenon thrown up by the wheel of daily life. Such a recurrent incident was the meeting of Norma and Jimmie Padgate during the next few weeks. She met him at Mrs. Deering's, she ran across him in the streets. Going to spend a weekend out of town, she found him on the platform of Paddington Station. The series of sheer coincidences established between them a certain familiarity. When next they met, it was in the crush of an emptying theatre. They found themselves blocked side by side, and they laughed as their eyes met.

“This seems to have got out of the domain of vulgar chance and become Destiny,” she said lightly.

“I am indeed favoured by the gods,” he replied.

“You don't deserve their good will because you have never come to see me.”

Jimmie replied that he was an old bear who loved to growl selfishly in his den. Norma retorted with a reference to Constance Deering. In her house he could growl altruistically.

“She pampers me with honey,” he explained.

“I am afraid you'll get nothing so Arcadian with us,” she replied, “but I can provide you with some excellent glucose.”

They were moved a few feet forward by the crowd, and then came to a halt again.

“This is my ward, Miss Aline Marden,” he said, presenting a pretty slip of a girl of seventeen, who had hung back shyly during the short dialogue, and looked with open-eyed admiration at Jimmie's new friend. “That is how she would be described in a court of law, but I don't mind telling you that really she is my nurse and foster-mother.”

The girl blushed at the introduction, and gave him an imperceptible twitch of the arm. Norma smiled at her graciously and asked her how she had liked the play.

“It was heavenly,” she said with a little sigh. “Did n't you think so?”

Norma, who had characterised the piece as the most dismal performance outside a little Bethel, was preparing a mendacious answer, when a sudden thinning in the crush brought to her side Mrs. Hardacre, from whom she had been separated. Mrs. Hardacre inquired querulously for Morland King, who had gone in search of the carriage. Norma reassured her as to his ability to find it, and introduced Jimmie and Aline. Mr. Padgate was Mr. King's oldest friend. Mrs. Hardacre bowed disapprovingly, took in with a hard glance the details of Aline's cheap, homemade evening frock, and the ready-made cape over her shoulders, and turned her head away with a sniff. She had been put out of temper the whole evening by Norma's glacial treatment of King, and was not disposed to smile at the nobodies whom it happened to please Norma to patronise.

At last King beckoned to them from the door, and they crushed through the still waiting crowd to join him. By the time Jimmie Padgate and his ward had reached the pavement they had driven off.

“Wonder if we can get a cab,” said Jimmie.

“Cab!” cried the girl, taking his arm affectionately. “One would think you were a millionaire. You can go in a cab if you like, but I'm going home in a 'bus. Come along. We'll get one at Piccadilly Circus.”

She hurried him on girlishly, talking of the play they had just seen. It was heavenly, she repeated. She had never been in the stalls before. She wished kind-hearted managers would send them seats every night. Then suddenly:

“Why did n't you tell me how beautiful she was?”

“Who, dear?”

“Why, Miss Hardacre. I think she is the loveliest thing I have ever seen. I could sit and look at her all day long. Why don't you paint her portrait—in that wonderful ivory-satin dress she was wearing to-night? And the diamond star in her hair that made her look like a queen—did you notice it? Why, Jimmie, you are not paying the slightest attention!”

“My dear, I could repeat verbatim every word you have said,” he replied soberly. “She is indeed one of the most beautiful of God's creatures.”

“Then you'll paint her portrait?”

“Perhaps, deary,” said Jimmie, “perhaps.”

Meanwhile in the brougham King was giving Norma an account of Jimmie's guardianship. She had asked him partly out of curiosity, partly to provide him with a subject of conversation, and partly to annoy her mother, whose disapproving sniff she had noted with some resentment. And this in brief is the tale that King told.

Some ten years ago, John Marden, a brother artist of Jimmie Padgate's, died penniless, leaving his little girl of seven with the alternative of fighting her way alone through an unsympathetic world, or of depending on the charity of his only sister, a drunken shrew of a woman, the wife of a small apothecary, and the casual mother of a vague and unwashed family. Common decency made the first alternative impossible. On their return to the house after the funeral, the aunt announced her intention of caring for the orphan as her own flesh and blood. Jimmie, who had taken upon himself the functions of the intestate's temporary executor, acquiesced dubiously. The lady, by no means sober, shed copious tears and a rich perfume of whisky. She called Aline to her motherly bosom. The child, who had held Jimmie's hand throughout the mournful proceedings, for he had been her slave and playfellow for the whole of her little life, advanced shyly. Her aunt took her in her arms. But the child, with instinctive repugnance to the smell of spirits, shrank from her kisses. The shrew arose in the woman; she shook her vindictively, and gave her three or four resounding slaps on face and shoulders. Jimmie leaped from his chair, tore the scared little girl from the vixen's clutches, and taking her bodily in his arms, strode with her out of the house, leaving the apothecary and his wife to settle matters between them. It was only when he had walked down the street and hailed a cab that he began to consider the situation.

“What on earth am I to do with you?” he asked whimsically.

The small arms tightened round his neck. “Take me to live with you,” sobbed the child.

“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings we learn wisdom. So be it,” said Jimmie, and he drove home with his charge.

As neither aunt nor uncle nor any human being in the wide world claimed the child, she became mistress of Jimmie's home from that hour. Her father's pictures and household effects were sold off to pay his creditors, and a little bundle of torn frocks and linen was Aline's sole legacy.

“I happened to look in upon him the evening of her arrival,” said King, by way of conclusion to his story. “In those days he managed with a charwoman who came only in the mornings, so he was quite alone in the place with the kid. What do you think I found him doing? Sitting cross-legged on the model-platform with a great pair of scissors and needles and thread, cutting down one of his own night garments so as to fit her, while the kid in a surprising state of déshabillé was seated on a table, kicking her bare legs and giving him directions. His explanation was that Miss Marden's luggage had not yet arrived and she must be made comfortable for the night! But you never saw anything so comic in your life.”

He leaned back and laughed at the reminiscence, not unkindly. Mrs. Hardacre, bored by the unprofitable tale, stared at the dim streets out of the brougham window. Norma, on friendlier terms with King, the little human story having perhaps drawn them together, joined in the laugh.

“And now, I suppose, when she grows a bit older, Mr. Padgate will marry her and she will be a dutiful little wife and they will live happy and humdrum ever after.”

“I hope he will provide her with some decent rags to put on,” said Mrs. Hardacre. “Those the child was wearing to-night were fit for a servant maid.”

“Jimmie would give her his skin if she could wear it,” said Morland, somewhat tartly.

This expression of feeling gave him, for the first time, a special place in Norma's esteem. After all, a woman desires to like the man who in a few months' time may be her husband, and hitherto Morland had presented a negativity of character which had baffled and irritated her. The positive trait of loyalty to a friend she welcomed instinctively, although if charged with the emotion she would have repudiated the accusation. When the carriage stopped at the awning and red strip of carpet before the house in Eaton Square where a dance awaited her, and she took leave of him, she returned his handshake with almost a warm pressure and sent him away, a sanguine lover, to his club.

The next morning Constance Deering, taking her on a round of shopping, enquired how the romance was proceeding.

“He has had me on probation,” replied Norma, “and has been examining all my points. I rather think he finds me satisfactory, and is about to make an offer.”

“What an idyllic pair you are!” laughed her friend.

Norma took the matter seriously.

“The man is perfectly right. He is on the lookout for a woman who can keep up or perhaps add to his social prestige, who can conduct the affairs of a large establishment when he enters political life, who can possibly give him a son to inherit his estate, and who can wear his family diamonds with distinction—and it does require a woman of presence to do justice to family diamonds, you know. He looks round society and sees a girl that may suit him. Naturally he takes his time and sizes her up. I have learned patience and so I let him size to his heart's content. On the other hand, what he can give me falls above the lower limit of my requirements, and personally I don't dislike him.”

“Mercy on us!” cried Constance Deering, “the man is head over ears in love with you!”

“Then I like him all the better for dissembling it so effectually,” said Norma, “and I hope he'll go on dissembling to the end of the chapter. I hate sentiment.”

They were walking slowly down Bond Street, and happened to pause before a picture-dealer's window, where a print of a couple of lovers bidding farewell caught Mrs. Deering's attention.

“I call that pretty,” she said. “Do you hate love too?”

Norma twirled her parasol and moved away, waiting for the other.

“Love, my dear Connie, is an appetite of the lower middle classes.”

“My dear Norma!” the other exclaimed, “I do wish Jimmie Padgate could hear you!”

Norma started at the name. “What has he got to do with the matter?”

“That's one of his pictures.”

“Oh, is it?” said Norma, indifferently. But feminine curiosity compelled a swift parting glance at the print.

“I imagine our guileless friend has a lot to learn,” she added. “A few truths about the ways of this wicked world would do him good.”

“I promised to go and look round his studio to-morrow morning; will you come and give him his first lesson?” asked Mrs. Deering, mischievously.

“Certainly not,” replied Norma.

But the destiny she had previously remarked upon seemed to be fulfilling itself. A day or two afterwards his familiar figure burst upon her at a Private View in a small picture-gallery. His eyes brightened as she withdrew from her mother, who was accompanying her, and extended her hand.

“Dear me, who would have thought of seeing you here? Do you care for pictures? Why have n't you told me? I am so glad.”

“Love of Art did n't bring me here, I assure you,” replied Norma.

“Then what did?”

Jimmie in his guilelessness had an uncomfortable way of posing fundamental questions. In that respect he was like a child. Norma smiled in silent contemplation of the real object of their visit. At first her mother had tossed the cards of invitation into the waste-paper basket. It was advertising impudence on the part of the painter man, whom she had met but once, to take her name in vain on the back of an envelope. Then hearing accidentally that the painter man had painted the portraits of many high-born ladies, including that of the Duchess of Wiltshire, and that the Duchess of Wiltshire herself—their own duchess, who gave Mrs. Hardacre the tip of her finger to shake and sometimes the tip of a rasping tongue to meditate upon, whom Mrs. Hardacre had tried any time these ten years to net for Heddon Court, their place in the country—had graciously promised to attend the Private View, in her character of Lady Patroness-in-Chief of the painter man, Mrs. Hardacre had hurried home and had set the servants' hall agog in search of the cards. Eventually they had been discovered in the dust-bin, and she had spent half an hour in cleansing them with bread-crumbs, much to Norma's sardonic amusement. The duchess not having yet arrived, Mrs. Hardacre had fallen back upon the deaf Dowager Countess of Solway, who was discoursing to her in a loud voice on her late husband's method of breeding prize pigs. Norma had broken away from this exhilarating lecture to greet Jimmie.

He kept his eager eyes upon her, still waiting for an answer to his question:

“What did?”

Norma, fairly quick-witted, indicated the walls with a little comprehensive gesture.

“Do you call this simpering, uninspired stuff Art?” she said, begging the question.

“Oh, it's not that,” cried Jimmie, falling into the trap. “It's really very good of its kind. Amazingly clever. Of course it's not highly finished. It's impressionistic. Look at that sweeping line from the throat all the way down to the hem of the skirt,” indicating the picture in front of them and following the curve, painter fashion, with bent-back thumb; “how many of your fellows in the Academy could get that so clean and true?”

“I have just met Mr. Porteous, who said he could n't stay any longer because such quackery made him sick,” said Norma.

Jimmie glanced round the walls. Porteous, the Royal Academician, was right. The colour was thin, the modelling flat, the drawing tricky, the invention poor. A dull soullessness ran through the range of full-length portraits of women. He realised, with some distress, the clever insincerity of the painting; but he had known Foljambe, the author of these coloured crimes, as a fellow-student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, and having come to see his work for the first time, could not bear to judge harshly. It was characteristic of him to expatiate on the only merit the work possessed.

“Mr. Porteous even said,” continued Norma, “that it was scandalous such a man should be making thousands when men of genius were making hundreds. It was taking the bread out of their mouths.”

“I am sorry he said that,” said Jimmie. “I think we ought rather to be glad that a man of poor talent has been so successful. So many of them go to the wall.”

“Do you always find the success of your inferior rivals so comforting?” asked Norma. “I don't.” She thought of the depredatory American.

Jimmie pushed his hat to the back of his head—a discoloured Homburg hat that had seen much wear—and rammed his hands in his pockets.

“It's horrible to regard oneself and one's fellow-creatures as so many ghastly fishes tearing one another to pieces so as to get at the same piece of offal. That's what it all comes to, does n't it?”

The picture of the rapt duke as garbage floating on the tide of London Society brought with it a certain humourous consolation. That of her own part in the metaphor did not appear so soothing. Jimmie's proposition being, however, incontrovertible, she changed the subject and enquired after Aline. Why had n't he brought her?

“I am afraid we should have argued about Foljambe's painting,” said Jimmie, with innocent malice.

“And we should have agreed about it,” replied Norma. She talked about Aline. Morland King had been tale-bearing. It was refreshing, she confessed, once in a way to hear good of one's fellow-creatures: like getting up at six in the morning in the country and drinking milk fresh from the cow. It conferred a sense of unaccustomed virtue. The mention of milk reminded her that she was dying for tea. Was it procurable?

“There's a roomful of it. Can I take you?” asked Jimmie, eagerly.

She assented. Jimmie piloted her through the chattering crowd. On the way they passed by Mrs. Hardacre, still devoting the pearls of her attention to the pigs. She acknowledged his bow distantly and summoned her daughter to her side.

“What are you affiché-ing yourself with that nondescript man for?” she asked in a cross whisper.

Norma moved away with a shrug, and went with Jimmie into the crowded tea-room. There, while he was fighting for tea at the buffet, she fell into a nest of acquaintances. Presently he emerged from the crush victorious, and, as he poured out the cream for her, became the unconscious target of sharp feminine glances.

“Who is your friend?” asked one lady, as Jimmie retired with the cream-jug.

“I will introduce him if you like,” she replied. He reappeared and was introduced vaguely. Then he stood silent, listening to a jargon he was at a loss to comprehend. The women spoke in high, hard voices, with impure vowel sounds and a clipping of final consonants. The conversation gave him a confused impression of Ascot, a horse, a foreign prince, and a lady of fashion who was characterised as a “rotter.” Allusion was also made to a princely restaurant, which Jimmie, taken thither one evening by King, regarded as a fairy-land of rare and exquisite flavours, and the opinion was roundly expressed that you could not get anything fit to eat in the place and that the wines were poison.

Jimmie listened wonderingly. No one seemed disposed to controvert the statement, which was made by quite a young girl. Indeed one of her friends murmured that she had had awful filth there a few nights before. A smartly dressed woman of forty who had drawn away from the general conversation asked Jimmie if he had been to Cynthia yet. He replied that he very seldom went to theatres. The lady burst out laughing, and then seeing the genuine enquiry on his face, checked herself.

“I thought you were trying to pull my leg,” she explained. “I mean Cynthia, the psychic, the crystal gazer. Why, every one is going crazy over her. Do you mean to say you have n't been?”

“Heaven forbid!” said Jimmie.

“You may scoff, but she's wonderful. Do you know she actually gave me the straight tip for the Derby? She did n't mean to, for she does n't lay herself out for that sort of thing—but she said, after telling me a lot of things about myself—things that had really happened—she was getting tired, I must tell you—'I see something in your near future—it is a horse with a white star on its forehead—it has gone—I don't know what it means.' I went to the Derby. I had n't put a cent on, as I had been cleaned out at Cairo during the winter and had to retrench. The first horse that was led out had a white star on his forehead. None of the others had. It was St. Damien—a thirty to one chance. I backed him outright for £300. And now I have £9000 to play with. Don't tell me there's nothing in Cynthia after that.”

The knot of ladies dissolved. Jimmie put Norma's teacup down and went slowly back with her to the main room. He was feeling depressed, having lost his bearings in this unfamiliar world. Suddenly he halted.

“I wish you could pinch me,” he said.

“Why?”

“To test whether I am awake. Have I really heard a sane and educated lady expressing her belief in the visions of a crystal-gazing adventuress?”

“You have. She believes firmly. So do heaps of women.”

“I hope to heaven you don't!” he cried with a sudden intensity.

“What concern can my faith be to you?” she asked.

“I beg your pardon. No concern at all,” he said apologetically. “But I generally blurt out what is in my mind.”

“And what is in your mind? I am a person you can be quite frank with.”

“I could n't bear the poem of your life to be sullied by all these vulgarities,” said Jimmie.

“As I remarked to you the first evening I met you, Mr. Padgate,” she said, holding out her hand by way of dismissal, “you are an astonishing person!”

The poem of her life! The phrase worried her before she slept that night. She shook the buzzing thing away from her impatiently. The poem of her life! The man was a fool.

Chapter III—A MODERN BETROTHAL

A YOUNG woman bred to a material view of the cosmos and self-trained to cynical expression of her opinions may thoroughly persuade herself that marriage is a social bargain in which it would be absurd for sentiment to have a place, and yet when the hour comes for deciding on so trivial an engagement, may find herself in an irritatingly unequable frame of mind. For Norma the hour had all but arrived. Morland King had asked to see her alone in view of an important conversation. She had made an appointment for ten o'clock, throwing over her evening's engagements. Her parents were entertaining a couple of friends in somebody else's box at the opera, and would return in time to save the important conversation from over-tediousness. She intended to amuse herself placidly with a novel until King's arrival.

This was a week or two after her encounter with Jimmie at the picture-gallery, since which occasion she had neither seen nor heard of him. He had faded from the surface of a consciousness kept on continued strain by the thousand incidents and faces of a London season. To Jimmie the series of meetings had been a phenomenon of infinite import. She had come like a queen of romance into his homely garden, and her radiance lingered, making the roses redder and the grass more green. But the queenly apparition herself had other things to think about, and when she had grown angry and called him a fool, had dismissed him definitely from her mind. It was annoying therefore that on this particular evening the fool phrase should buzz again in her ears.

She threw down her book and went on to the balcony, where, on this close summer night, she could breathe a little cool air. A clock somewhere in the house chimed the half-hour. Morland was to come at ten. She longed for, yet dreaded, his coming; regretted that she had stayed away from the opera, where, after all, she could have observed the everlasting human comedy. She had dined early; the evening had been interminable; she felt nervous, and raged at her weakness. She was tired, out of harmony with herself, fretfully conscious too of the jarring notes in a room furnished by uneducated people of sudden wealth. The Wolff-Salamons, out of the kindness of their shrewd hearts, had offered the house for the season to the Hardacres, who had accepted the free quarters with profuse expressions of gratitude; which, however, did not prevent Mr. Hardacre from railing at the distance of the house (which was in Holland Park) from his club, or his wife from deprecating to her friends her temporary residence in what she was pleased to term the Ghetto. Nor did the Wolff-Salamons' generosity mitigate the effect of their furniture on Norma's nerves. When Jimmie's phrase came into her head with the suddenness of a mosquito, she could bear the room no longer.

She sat on the balcony and waited for Morland. There at least she was free from the flaring gold and blue, and the full-length portrait of the lady of the house, on which with delicate savagery the eminent painter had catalogued all the shades of her ancestral vulgarity. Perhaps it was this portrait that had brought back the irony of Jimmie's tribute. The poem of her life! She sat with her chin on her palm, thinking bitterly of circumstance. She had never been happy, had grown to disbelieve in so absurd and animal a state. It had always been the same, as far back as she could remember. Her childhood: nurses and governesses—a swift succession of the latter till she began to regard them as remote from her inner life as the shop girl or railway guard with whom she came into casual contact. The life broken by visits abroad to fashionable watering or gambling places where she wandered lonely and proud, neglected by her parents, watching with keen eyes and imperturbable face the frivolities, the vices, the sordidnesses, taking them all in, speculating upon them, resolving some problems unaided and storing up others for future elucidation. Her year at the expensive finishing school in Paris where the smartest daughters of America babbled and chattered of money, money, till the air seemed unfit for woman to breathe unless it were saturated with gold dust. As hers was not, came discontent and overweening ambitions. Yet the purity was not all killed. She remembered her first large dinner-party. The same Lord Wyniard of the unclean scandal had taken her down. He was thirty years older than she, and an unsavoury reputation had reached even her young ears. The man regarded her with the leer of a satyr. She realised with a shudder for the first time the meaning of a phrase she had constantly met with in French novels—“il la dévêtit de ses yeux.” His manner was courtly, his air of breeding perfect; yet he managed to touch her fingers twice, and he sought to lead her on to dubious topics of conversation. She was frightened.

In the drawing-room, seeing him approach, she lost her head, took shelter with her mother, and trembling whispered to her, “Don't let that man come and talk to me again, mother, he's a beast.” She was bidden not to be a fool. The man had a title and twenty thousand a year, and she had evidently made an impression. A week afterwards her mother invited a bishop and his wife and Lord Wyniard to dinner, and Lord Wyniard took Norma down again. And that was her start in the world. She had followed the preordained course till now, with many adventures indeed by the way, but none that could justify the haunting phrase—the poem of her life!

Was the man such a fool, after all? Was it even ignorance on his part? Was it not, rather, wisdom on a lofty plane immeasurably above the commonplaces of ignorance and knowledge? The questions presented themselves to her vaguely. She was filled with a strange unrest, a craving for she knew not what. Yet she would shortly have in her grasp all—or nearly all—that she had aimed at in life. She counted the tale of her future possessions—houses, horses, diamonds, and the like. She seemed to have owned them a thousand years.

The clock in the house chimed ten in a pretentious musical way, which irritated her nerves. The silence after the last of the ten inexorable tinkles fell gratefully. Then she realised that in a minute or two Morland would arrive. Her heart began to beat, and she clasped her hands together in a nervous suspense of which she had not dreamed herself capable. A cab turned the corner of the street, approached with crescendo rattle, and stopped at the house. She saw Morland alight and reach up to pay the cabman. For a silly moment she had a wild impulse to cry to him over the balcony to go away and leave her in peace. She waited until she heard the footman open the front door and admit him, then bracing herself, she entered the drawing-room, looked instinctively in a mirror, and sat down.

She met him cordially enough, returned his glance somewhat defiantly. The sight of him, florid, sleek, faultlessly attired, brought her back within the every-day sphere of dulled sensation. He held her hand long enough for him to say, after the first greeting:

“You can guess what I've come for, can't you?”

“I suppose I do,” she admitted in an off-hand way. “You will find frankness one of my vices. Won't you sit down?”

She motioned him to a chair, and seating herself on a sofa, prepared to listen.

“I've come to ask you to marry me,” said King.

“Well?” she asked, looking at him steadily.

“I want to know how it strikes you,” he continued after a brief pause. “I think you know practically all that I can tell you about myself. I can give you what you want up to about fifteen thousand a year—it will be more when my mother dies. We're decent folk—old county family—I can offer you whatever society you like. You and I have tastes in common, care for the same things, same sort of people. I'm sound in wind and limb—never had a day's illness in my life, so you would n't have to look after a cripple. And I'd give the eyes out of my head to have you; you know that. How does it strike you?”

Norma had averted her glance from him towards the end of his speech, and leaning back was looking intently at her hands in her lap. For the moment she felt it impossible to reply. The words that had formulated themselves in her mind, “I think, Mr. King, the arrangement will be eminently advantageous to both parties,” were too ludicrous in their adequacy to the situation. So she merely sat silent and motionless, regarding her manicured finger-nails, and awaiting another opening. King changed his seat to the sofa, by her side, and leaned forward.

“If you had been a simpler, more unsophisticated girl, Norma, I should have begun differently. I thought it would please you if I put sentiment aside.”

Her head motioned acquiescence.

“But I'm not going to put it aside,” he went on. “It has got its place in the world, even when a man makes a proposal of marriage. And when I say I'm in love with you, that I have been in love with you since the first time I saw you, it's honest truth.”

“Say you have a regard, a high regard, even,” said Norma, still not looking at him, “and I'll believe you.”

“I'm hanged if I will,” said Morland. “I say I'm in love with you.”

Norma suddenly softened. The phrase tickled her ears again—this time pleasantly. The previous half-hour's groping in the dark of herself seemed to have resulted in discovery. She gave him a fleeting smile of mockery.

“Listen,” she said. “If you will be contented with regard, a high regard, on my side, I will marry you. I really like you very much. Will that do?”

“It is all I ask now. The rest will come by and by.”

“I'm not so sure. We had better be perfectly frank with each other from the start, for we shall respect each other far more. Anyhow, if you treat me decently, as I am sure you will, you may be satisfied that I shall carry out my part of the bargain. My bosom friends tell one another that I am worldly and heartless and all that—but I've never lied seriously or broken a promise in my life.”

“Very well. Let us leave it at that,” said Morland. “I suppose your people will have no objection?”

“None whatever,” replied Norma, drily.

“When can I announce our engagement?”

“Whenever you like.”

He took two or three reflective steps about the room and reseated himself on the sofa.

“Norma,” he said softly, bending towards her, “I believe on such occasions there is a sort of privilege accorded to a fellow—may I?”

She glanced at him, hesitated, then proffered her cheek. He touched it with his lips.

The ceremony over, there ensued a few minutes of anticlimax. Norma breathed more freely. There had been no difficulties, no hypocrisies. The mild approach to rapture on Morland's part was perhaps, after all, only a matter of common decency, to be accepted by her as a convention of the scène à faire. So was the kiss. She broke the spell of awkwardness by rising, crossing the room, and turning off an electric pendant that illuminated the full-length portrait on the wall.

“We can't stand Mrs. Wolff-Salamon's congratulations so soon,” she said with a laugh.

Conversation again became possible. They discussed arrangements. King suggested a marriage in the autumn. Norma, with a view to the prolongation of what appealed to her as a novel and desirable phase of existence—maidenhood relieved of the hateful duty of husband-hunting and unclouded by parental disapprobation—pleaded for delay till Christmas. She argued that in all human probability the Parliamentary vacancy at Cosford, the safe seat on which Morland reckoned, would occur in the autumn, and he could not fix the date of an election at his own good pleasure. He must, besides, devote his entire energy to the business; time enough when it was over to think of such secondary matters as weddings, bridal tours, and the setting up of establishments.

“But you have to be considered, Norma,” he said, half convinced.

“My dear Morland,” she replied with a derisive lip, “I should never dream of coming between you and your public career.”

He reflected a moment. “Why should we not get married at once?”

Norma laughed. “You are positively pastoral! No, my dear Morland, that's what the passionate young lover always says to the coy maiden in the play, but if you will remember, it does n't seem to work even there. Besides, you must let me gratify my ambitions. When I was very young, I vowed I would marry an emperor. Then I toned him down into a prince. Later, becoming more practical, I dreamed of a peer. Finally I descended to a Member of Parliament. I can't marry you before you are a Member.”

“You could have had dozens of 'em for the asking, I'm sure,” returned the prospective legislator with a grin. “Take them all round, they're a shoddy lot.”

He yielded eventually to Norma's proposal, alluding, however, with an air of ruefulness, to the infinite months of waiting he would have to endure. Tactfully she switched him off the line of sentiment to that of soberer politics. She put forward the platitude that a Parliamentary life was one of great interest. Morland did not rise even to this level of enthusiasm.

“'Pon my soul, I really don't know why I'm going in for it. I promised old Potter years ago that I would come in when he gave up, and the people down there more or less took it for granted, the duchess included, and so without having thought much of it one way or the other, I find myself caught in a net. It will be a horrible bore. The whole of the session will be one dismal yawn. Never to be certain of sitting down to one's dinner in peace and comfort. Never to know when one will have to rush off at a moment's notice to take part in a confounded division. To have shoals of correspondence on subjects one knows nothing of and cares less for. It will be the life of a sweated tailor. And I, of all people, who like to take things easy! I'm not quite sure whether I'm an idiot or a hero.”

He ended in a short laugh and leaned against the mantelpiece, his hands in his pockets.

“It would be the sweet and pretty thing for me to say,” remarked Norma, “that in my eyes you will always be heroic.”

“Well, 'pon my soul, I shall be. We 'll see precious little of one another.”

“We 'll have all the more chance of prolonging our illusions,” she replied.

On the whole, however, her conduct towards him was irreproachable. The thaw from her usual iciness to this comparatively harmless raillery flattered the lover's self-esteem. Woman-wise, as every man in the profundity of his vain heart believes himself to be, he not only attributed the change to his own powers of seduction, but interpreted as significant of a yet greater transformation. A man of Morland's type is seldom afflicted with a morbid subtlety of perception; and when he has gained for his own personal use and adornment a woman of singular distinction, he may be readily pardoned for a slight attack of fatuity.

The idyllic hour was brought to a close by the return of Norma's parents. As Norma, shrinking from the vulgarity of the prearranged scene and intolerable maternal coaching in her part, had not informed them of her appointment with Morland, alleging as an excuse for not going to the opera a disinclination to be bored to tears by Aida, they were mildly surprised by his presence in the house at so late an hour. In a few words he acquainted them with what had taken place. He formally asked their consent. Mr. Hardacre wrung his hand fervently. Mrs. Hardacre's steel-grey eyes glittered welcome into her family. She turned to her dear child and expressed her heartfelt joy. Norma, submissive to conventional decencies, suffered herself to be kissed. Mother and daughter had given up kissing as a habit for some years past, though they practised it occasionally before strangers. Mr. Hardacre put his arm around her in a diffident way and patted her back, murmuring incoherent wishes for her happiness. Everything to be said and done was effected in a perfectly well-bred manner. Norma spoke very little, regarding the proceedings with an impersonal air of satiric interest. At last Mr. Hardacre suggested to Morland a chat over whisky and soda and a cigar in the library. In unsophisticated circles it is not unusual at such a conjuncture for a girl's friends and relations to afford the lovers some unblushing opportunity of bidding each other a private farewell. Norma, anticipating any such possible though improbable departure from sanity on the part of her parents, made good her escape after shaking hands in an ordinary way with Morland. Mrs. Hardacre followed her upstairs, eager to learn details, which were eventually given with some acidity by her daughter, and the two men retired below.

“My boy,” said Mr. Hardacre, as they parted an hour afterwards, “you will find that Norma has had the training that will make her a damned fine woman.”

Chapter IV—THE GREAT FROCK EPISODE

JIMMIE PADGATE was the son of a retired commander in the Navy, of irreproachable birth and breeding, of a breezy impulsive disposition, and with a pretty talent as an amateur actor. Finding idleness the root of all boredom, he took to the stage, and during the first week of his first provincial tour fell in love with the leading lady, a fragile waif of a woman of vague upbringing. That so delicate a creature should have to face the miseries of a touring life—the comfortless lodgings, the ill-cooked food, the damp death-traps of dressing-rooms, the long circuitous Sunday train-journeys—roused him to furious indignation. He married her right away, took her incontinently from things theatrical, and found congenial occupation in adoring her. But the hapless lady survived her marriage only long enough to see Jimmie safe into short frocks, and then fell sick and died. The impulsive sailor educated the boy in his own fashion for a dozen years or so, and then he, in his turn, died, leaving his son a small inheritance to be administered by his only brother, an easy-going bachelor in a Government office. This inheritance sufficed to send Jimmie to Harrow, where he began his life-long friendship with Morland King, and to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he learned many useful things beside the method of painting pictures. When he returned to London, his uncle handed him over the hundred or two that remained, and, his duty being accomplished, fell over a precipice in the Alps, and concerned himself no more about his nephew. Then Jimmie set to work to earn his living.

When he snatched the child Aline from the embraces of her tipsy aunt and carried her out into the street, wondering what in the world he should do with her, he was just under thirty years of age. How he had earned a livelihood till then and kept himself free from debt he scarcely knew. When he obtained a fair price for a picture, he deposited a lump sum with his landlord in respect of rent in advance, another sum with the keeper of the little restaurant where he ate his meals, and frittered the rest away among his necessitous friends. In the long intervals between sales, he either went about penniless or provided himself with pocket money by black and white or other odd work that comes in the young artist's way. His residence at that time consisted in a studio and a bedroom in Camden Town. His wants were few, his hopes were many. He loved his art, he loved the world. His optimistic temperament brought him smiles from all those with whom he came in contact—even from dealers, when he wasted their time in expounding to them the commercial value of an unmarketable picture. He was quite happy, quite irresponsible. When soberer friends reproached him for his hand-to-mouth way of living, he argued that if he scraped to-day he would probably spread the butter thick tomorrow, thus securing the average, the golden mean, which was the ideal of their respectability. As for success, that elusive will-o'-the-wisp, the man who did not enjoy the humour of failure never deserved to succeed.

But when he had rescued Aline from the limbo over the small apothecary's shop, as thoughtlessly and as gallantly as his father before him had rescued the delicate lady from the trials of theatrical vagabondage, he found himself face to face with a perplexing problem. That first night he had risen from an amorphous bed he had arranged for himself on the studio floor, and entered his own bedroom on tiptoe, and looked with pathetic helplessness on the tiny child asleep beneath his bedclothes. If it had been a boy, he would have had no particular puzzle. A boy could have been stowed in a corner of the studio, where he could have learned manners and the fear of God and the way of smiling at adversity. He would have profited enormously, as Jimmie felt assured, by his education. But with a girl it was vastly different. An endless vista of shadowy, dreamy, delicate possibilities perplexed him. He conceived women as beings ethereal, with a range of exquisite emotions denied to masculine coarseness. Even the Rue Bonaparte had not destroyed his illusion, and he still attributed to the fair Maenads of the Bal des Quatre-z' Arts the lingering fragrance of the original Psyche. Of course Jimmie was a fool, as ten years afterwards Norma had decided; but this view of himself not occurring to him, he had to manage according to his lights. Here was this mysterious embryo goddess entirely dependent on him. No corner of the studio and rough-and-tumble discipline for her. She must sleep on down and be covered with silk; the airs of heaven must not visit her cheek too roughly; the clatter of the brazen world must not be allowed to deafen her to her own sweet inner harmonies. Jimmie was sorely perplexed.

His charwoman next morning could throw no light on the riddle. She had seven children of her own, four of them girls, and they had to get along the best way they could. She was of opinion that if let alone and just physicked when she had any complaint, Aline would grow up of her own accord. Jimmie said that this possibility had not struck him, but doubtless the lady was right. Could she tell him how many times a day a little girl ought to be fed and what she was to eat? The charwoman's draft upon her own family experiences enlightened Jimmie so far that he put a sovereign into her hand to provide a dinner for her children. After that he consulted her no more. It was an expensive process.

Meanwhile it was obvious that a studio and one bedroom would not be sufficient accommodation, and Jimmie, greatly daring, took a house. He also engaged a resident housekeeper for himself and a respectable cat for Aline, and when he had settled down, after having spent every penny he could scrape together on furniture, began to wonder how he could pay the rent. A month or two before he would have as soon thought of buying a palace in Park Lane as renting a house in St. John's Wood—a cheap, shabby little house, it is true; but still a house, with drawing-room, dining-room, bedrooms, and a studio built over the space where once the garden tried to smile. He wandered through it with a wonderment quite as childish as that of Aline, who had helped him to buy the furniture. But how was he ever going to pay the rent?

After a time he ceased asking the question. The ravens that fed Elijah provided him with the twenty quarterly pieces of gold. Picture-dealers of every hue and grade supplied him with the wherewithal to live. In those early days he penetrated most of the murky byways of his art—alleys he would have passed by with pinched nose a year before, when an empty pocket and an empty stomach concerned himself alone. Now, when the money for the last picture had gone, and no more was forthcoming by way of advance on royalties on plates, and the black and white market was congested, he did amazing things. He copied old Masters for a red-faced, beery print-seller in Frith Street, who found some mysterious market for them. The price can be gauged by the fact that years afterwards Jimmie recognised one of his own copies in an auction room, and heard it knocked down as a genuine Velasquez for eleven shillings and sixpence. He also painted oil landscapes for a dealer who did an immense trade in this line, selling them to drapers and fancy-warehousemen, who in their turn retailed them to an art-loving public, framed in gold, at one and eleven pence three farthings; and the artist's rate of payment was five shillings a dozen—panels supplied, but not the paint. To see Jimmie attack these was the child Aline's delight. In after years she wept in a foolish way over the memory. He would do half a dozen at a time: first dash in the foregrounds, either meadows or stretches of shore, then wash in bold, stormy skies, then a bit of water, smooth or rugged according as it was meant to represent pool or sea; then a few vigorous strokes would put in a ship and a lighthouse on one panel, a tree and a cow on a second, a woman and a cottage on a third. And all the time, as he worked at lightning speed, he would laugh and joke with the child, who sat fascinated by the magic with which each mysterious mass of daubs and smudges grew into a living picture under his hand. When his invention was at a loss, he would call upon her to suggest accessories; and if she cried out “windmill,” suddenly there would spring from under the darting brush-point a mill with flapping sails against the sky. Now and again in his hurry Jimmie would make a mistake, and Aline would shriek with delight:

Where Love Is

WHERE LOVE IS

By William J. Locke

New York

Grosset & Dunlap Publishers

Copyright, 1903 By John Lane

“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”

The Proverbe of Solomon

WHERE LOVE IS

Chapter I—THE FIRST GLIMPSE

Chapter II—THE FOOL'S WISDOM

Chapter III—A MODERN BETROTHAL

Chapter IV—THE GREAT FROCK EPISODE