Not having seen the vicious contortions of Stuart’s features as he penned these sentences, Sebastian was for the nonce satisfied.—“When it is published”—how devoutly he longed for this consummation of his labours. To lay at Stuart’s feet a pile of scribbled paper was comparatively nothing; but to be the means of spreading the master’s word throughout the British Isles, in a bound volume of sturdy print, containing the master’s name at the beginning, for all to reverence and comment upon,—this, surely, was a worthy tribute, sufficient to win the “well done!” that the disciple so burningly coveted. Sebastian’s desire to publish was completely unselfish; he was proud of his book only inasmuch as it reflected Stuart; thirsted for fame merely that the rays might fall on Stuart’s head. The utmost he wished for himself was sufficient recognition of the Vision Splendid, that men might say, men and his father and the Johnsons: “I thought young Levi mad at the time, to have chucked such excellent worldly prospects; but now I marvel how right he was, how much clearer was his sight than ours, how quickly responsive was his soul to what has taken us three-hundred-and-sixteen pages of solid reading to recognize!”... He could not quite hear Mr. Johnson uttering these precise words, but a homely vernacular would be forgiven for the sake of lofty sentiment. At present Sebastian was only received at Town House on sufferance; and trifling matters, such as the parlour left empty for him and Letty during four hours or so, were not arranged as willingly as might have been the case had the young man still been in possession of his fifteen hundred a year. Letty herself, however, compensated him richly for her parents’ unkindness. She grew ever prettier, ever more yielding, ever more necessary for Sebastian’s peace of mind and body. Ned Levi’s humble birth and ancestry had implanted a strain in the boy which found curious pleasure in his fiancée’s slightly common turn of phrase, her occasional lack of refinement in taste and clothes, her childish unpretentious longings, her tiny little vulgarisms. These were never sufficiently strident to jar him; they merely gave him a sense of returning to rest after a long journey; cessation of a cry in him that no riches or dissipations or intellectual strivings could ever thus lull to silence. Moreover, Letty clung to him; and he knew she believed herself clinging to a rock; supposition soothing to his own inner doubts.
The one thing in her that puzzled him was her continual reference to a near future when, as a matter of course, they should be as wealthy as before his renunciation of wealth. It could not be that she depended for this on his book, which, he had explained to her many times, was not a money-making proposition. And once, when he had laughingly asked if she proposed robbing Aladdin’s Cave or the Bank of England, for the fulfilment of her plans, she laid both hands on his shoulders, and demanded wistfully:
“Aren’t you sure yet, Sebastian?”
“Sure of what, sweetheart?”
She sighed, and turned away her head. Perhaps he had decided for a year-long test; if so, she must just be patient.—The door opened to admit Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. Baker, mother of that Violet who even now contemplated breaking off her engagement because Letty’s Sebastian had ‘a lovely mouth and jaw,’ and her own Ernie a receding chin. But Mrs. Baker bore no malice for this; her nature was soft as sponge, and formless as the garments which dripped and cascaded from indiscriminately outjutting portions of her figure; garments without end or beginning; rather dirty garments, of a period unknown to history.
“Disturbin’ your billing and cooing, are we?” she cried genially; “there, it’s a shame! But I only wanted to be introduced to your friend, Letty, my dear.” She beamed on Sebastian, noted at once that he was a Jew, and kindly resolved not to mention the fact that her late husband had been a parson. Then she changed her mind, and instead of tactfully skirting the subject of Sebastian’s misfortune—which, poor boy, was probably an accident and not his fault—she decided to refer to It exactly as if It didn’t matter, and thus put him entirely at his ease. So she started:
“And where are these young folk going to have the knot tied, Frances Johnson? At a registrar’s, I suppose,—as it can’t be done in Church. So nice ... dear things ...” wheezily.
Letty and her mother looked at one another. “Now that’s funny!” exclaimed Mrs. Johnson; “I never thought of that.”
“Thought of what?” asked Sebastian.
“Why, that you couldn’t be married in a church.”