"Please, please don't bother about money. We shall have heaps. There's no occasion for you to bother, and I won't have you bothering."
"What are you crying for?" he asked in a murmur.
"It's only--only because I think it's so nice of you trying to earn money like that," she lied. "I'm not really crying."
And she ran away, downstairs, really crying. It was excessively comic, but he had better not follow her, lest he might cry too....
A Patron of the Arts
A lull followed this crisis in the affairs of No. 29 Werter Road. Priam went on painting, and there was now no need for secrecy about it. But his painting was not made a subject of conversation. Both of them hesitated to touch it, she from tact, and he because her views on the art seemed to him to be lacking in subtlety. In every marriage there is a topic--there are usually several--which the husband will never broach to the wife, out of respect for his respect for her. Priam scarcely guessed that Alice imagined him to be on the way to lunacy. He thought she merely thought him queer, as artists are queer to non-artists. And he was accustomed to that; Henry Leek had always thought him queer. As for Alice's incredulous attitude towards the revelation of his identity, he did not mentally accuse her of treating him as either a liar or a madman. On reflection he persuaded himself that she regarded the story as a bad joke, as one of his impulsive, capricious essays in the absurd.
Thus the march of evolution was apparently arrested in Werter Road during three whole days. And then a singular event happened, and progress was resumed. Priam had been out since early morning on the riverside, sketching, and had reached Barnes, from which town he returned over Barnes Common, and so by the Upper Richmond Road to High Street. He was on the south side of Upper Richmond Road, whereas his tobacconist's shop was on the north side, near the corner. An unfamiliar peculiarity of the shop caused him to cross the street, for he was not in want of tobacco. It was the look of the window that drew him. He stopped on the refuge in the centre of the street. There was no necessity to go further. His picture of Putney Bridge was in the middle of the window. He stared at it fixedly. He believed his eyes, for his eyes were the finest part of him and never deceived him; but perhaps if he had been a person with ordinary eyes he would scarce have been able to believe them. The canvas was indubitably there present in the window. It had been put in a cheap frame such as is used for chromographic advertisements of ships, soups, and tobacco. He was almost sure that he had seen that same frame, within the shop, round a pictorial announcement of Taddy's Snuff. The tobacconist had probably removed the eighteenth-century aristocrat with his fingers to his nose, from the frame, and replaced him with Putney Bridge. In any event the frame was about half-an-inch too long for the canvas, but the gap was scarcely observable. On the frame was a large notice, 'For sale.' And around it were the cigars of two hemispheres, from Syak Whiffs at a penny each to precious Murias; and cigarettes of every allurement; and the multitudinous fragments of all advertised tobaccos; and meerschaums and briars, and patent pipes and diagrams of their secret machinery; and cigarette-and cigar-holders laid on plush; and pocket receptacles in aluminium and other precious metals.
Shining there, the picture had a most incongruous appearance. He blushed as he stood on the refuge. It seemed to him that the mere incongruity of the spectacle must inevitably attract crowds, gradually blocking the street, and that when some individual not absolutely a fool in art, had perceived the quality of the picture--well, then the trouble of public curiosity and of journalistic inquisitiveness would begin. He wondered that he could ever have dreamed of concealing his identity on a canvas. The thing simply shouted 'Priam Farll,' every inch of it. In any exhibition of pictures in London, Paris, Rome, Milan, Munich, New York or Boston, it would have been the cynosure, the target of ecstatic admirations. It was just such another work as his celebrated 'Pont d'Austerlitz,' which hung in the Luxembourg. And neither a frame of 'chemical gold,' nor the extremely variegated coloration of the other merchandise on sale could kill it.
However, there were no signs of a crowd. People passed to and fro, just as though there had not been a masterpiece within ten thousand miles of them. Once a servant girl, a loaf of bread in her red arms, stopped to glance at the window, but in an instant she was gone, running.
Priam's first instinctive movement had been to plunge into the shop, and demand from his tobacconist an explanation of the phenomenon. But of course he checked himself. Of course he knew that the presence of his picture in the window could only be due to the enterprise of Alice.