“By Jove!
I have a way with women!
There must be something of the Cave Man in me
Yes, something of the primeval!”
In his pocket was a little book of his own poems, bound in green and gold. As he had remarked to Mrs. Wimple, he was to deliver his message that afternoon.
III
Mrs. Watson's apartment (to which Ferdinand betook himself after idling a couple of hours at his club) was toward the top of a tall building which overlooked great fields of city. It was but three blocks distant from Ferdinand's own humbler apartment, in uptown New York, but it was large, and... well, Mr.
Wimple calculated, harbouring the sordid thought for an instant, that the rent must cost her seven or eight, thousand dollars a year.
Mrs. Watson's life was delicately scented with an attar of expense. She would not drench her rooms or her existence with wealth, any more than she would spill perfume upon her garments with a careless hand. But the sensitive' nostrils of the aesthetic Mr. Wimple quivered in reaction to the aroma. For a person who despised gold, as Mr. Wimple professed to despise it, he was strangely unrepelled. Perhaps he thought it to be his spiritual duty to purify this atmosphere with his message.
There were eighteen or twenty women there when Ferdinand arrived, and no man... except a weakeyed captive husband or two, and an epicene creature with a violin, if you want to call them men. Ferdinand, with his bovine body and his leonine head, seemed almost startlingly masculine in this assemblage, and felt so. His spirit, he had often confessed, was an instrument that vibrated best in unison with the subtle feminine soul; he felt it play upon him and woo him, with little winds that ran their fingers through his hair. These were women who had no occupation, and a number of them had money; they felt delightfully cultivated when persons such as Ferdinand talked to them about the Soul. They warmed, they expanded, half unconsciously they projected those breaths and breezes which thrilled our Ferdinand and wrought upon his mood. If a woman, idle and mature, cannot find romance anywhere else or anyhow other she will pick upon a preacher or an artist.