“I'll buy it back for you, or paint you another better one,” he offered promptly.
So the verses went to Ledward, and the first three appeared in the Christmas number of The Child at Home, illustrated—as even Stefan had to admit—with great beauty.
Mary would have given infinitely much for his collaboration, but she had not urged it, feeling he was right in his refusal.
As Christmas approached they began to make acquaintances among the polyglot population of the neighborhood. Their old hotel, the culinary aristocrat of the district, possessed a cafe in which, with true French hospitality, patrons were permitted to occupy tables indefinitely on the strength of the slenderest orders. Here for the sake of the French atmosphere Stefan would have dined nightly had Mary's frugality permitted. As it was, they began to eat there two or three nights a week, and dropped in after dinner on many other nights. They would sit at a bare round table smoking their cigarettes, Mary with a cup of coffee, Stefan with the liqueur he could never induce her to share, and watching the groups that dotted the other tables. Or they would linger at the cheapest of their restaurants and listen to the conversation of the young people, aggressively revolutionary, who formed its clientele. These last were always noisy, and assumed as a pose manners even worse than those they naturally possessed. Every one talked to every one else, regardless of introductions, and Stefan had to summon his most crushing manner to prevent Mary from being monopolized by various very youthful and visionary men who openly admired her. He was inclined to abandon the place, but Mary was amused by it for a time, bohemianism being a completely unknown quantity to her.
“Don't think this is the real thing,” he explained; “I've had seven years of that in Paris. This is merely a very crass imitation.”
“Imitation or not, it's most delightfully absurd and amusing,” said she, watching the group nearest her. This consisted of a very short and rotund man with hair a la Paderewski and a frilled evening shirt, a thin man of incredible stature and lank black locks, and a pretty young girl in a tunic, a tam o' shanter, enormous green hairpins, and tiny patent-leather shoes decorated with three inch heels. To her the lank man, who wore a red velvet shirt and a khaki-colored suit reminiscent of Mr. Bernard Shaw, was explaining the difference between syndicalism and trade-unionism in the same conversational tone which men in Lindum had used in describing to Mary the varying excellences of the two local hunts. “I.W.W.” and “A.F. of L.” fell from his lips as “M.F.H.” and “J.P.” used to from theirs. The contrast between the two worlds entertained her not a little. She thought all these young people looked clever, though singularly vulgar, and that her old friends would have appeared by comparison refreshingly clean and cultivated, but quite stupid.
“Why, Stefan, are dull, correct people always so clean, and clever and original ones usually so unwashed?” she wondered.
“Oh, the unwashed stage is like the measles,” he replied; “you are bound to catch it in early life.”
“I suppose that's true. I know even at Oxford the Freshmen go through an utterly ragged and disreputable phase, in which they like to pretend they have no laundry bill.”
“Yes, it advertises their emancipation. I went through it in Paris, but mine was a light case.”