“Take my advice and stop guessing,” laughed the Frenchman; “she’ll tell you when she gets ready, and not before. And she’ll have the wing completed on time, for nothing daunts her. To want a thing done is, with her, to have it finished. The new wing was an after-thought, and yet it did not delay the work an hour. She’ll be serving tea in that wreck next week.”
“It is because madame la marquise was born with a gift,” remarked Lemois dryly from his seat near the fire. “Her mind is constructive, and everything madame touches must have a definite beginning and lead up to a definite ending. Her sanity is shown in her never trying to do things for which she is not fitted. As a musician, or a painter, or even a sculptor, or in any occupation demanding a fine imagination, madame, it seems to me, would have been a pathetic failure.”
“How about an antiquary?” remarked Louis, blowing a ring of smoke across the table, a quizzical smile lighting up his face.
“As an antiquary, my dear Monsieur Louis, the eminent lady would have been a pronounced success. She is one now, for she insists on knowing that the thing she buys is genuine, and it saves her many absurdities. I can think of nothing in her collection that can be questioned—and I cannot say that of my own.”
“And so you don’t believe that a man or a woman can make what they please of themselves?” asked Herbert, who was always glad to hear from Lemois.
“Not any more than I believe that tulip bulbs will grow blackberries if I water them enough.”
“It’s all a question of blood,” essayed Le Blanc, snipping the end from his cigar with a gold cutter attached to his watch-chain. “Failures in life are almost always due to a scrap of gray tissue clogging up a gentleman’s brain, which, ten chances to one, he has inherited from some plebeian ancestor.”
“Failures in life come from nothing of the sort!” blurted out Louis. “It’s just dead laziness, and of the cheapest kind. All the painters I knew at Julien’s who waited for a mood are waiting yet.”
“The trouble with most unsuccessful men,” volunteered Brierley, “is the everlasting trimming up of a square peg to make it fit a round hole.”
“Then drive it in and make it fit,” answered Louis. “It will hug all the tighter for the raw edges it raises.”