"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing herself. He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.
"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then, passing his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the house."
He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouser-presses—all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's domestic economy. And whenever my wonder paid the expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I really don't see how people manage to live without that."
Well—it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he was, through it all and in spite of it all—as he had been through, and in spite of, his pictures—so handsome, so charming, so disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with your work!"
But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected check.
"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery: no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in a picture weekly—above all, no least sign of ever having been used as a studio.
The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break with his old life.
"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still looking about for a trace of such activity.
"Never," he said briefly.
"Or water-colour—or etching?"