"Oh, play ball," growled Gouverneur. "Who cares—so long as he keeps out of here."
Unaware of these unflattering comments, Markham strolled out of doors and into a lonely armchair on the terrace, and smoked in solitary dignity. Indeed solitude seemed to be the only thing left to him. He was not a man who made friends rapidly, and the three or four people whom he might have cared to cultivate had other fish to fry to-night—and were not frying them on the terrace. Olga, it seemed, had no intention of returning and Hermia Challoner was doubtless already in that happy phase of experimentation so warmly advocated by Reggie Armistead.
He envied those two young people their carelessness, their grace, their ruddy delights which by contrast added conviction to Olga's indictment of him. He tried with some difficulty to analyze the precise nature of his sentiments toward Olga Tcherny, and found at the end of a quarter of an hour, to his surprise, that the only feeling of which he was conscious was one of dull resentment at her for having made a fool of him.
Whatever Markham the painter had accomplished in the delineation of character of the fashionable women he had painted, the truth was that Markham both feared and misunderstood them. Their changing moods, their unaccountable likes and dislikes, their petty ambitions and vanities he accepted as part of the heritage of a race of beings apart form his own, and he hid his timidity under a brusque manner which gave him credit for a keener penetration than he actually possessed. And, strangely enough, Fate, with sardonic humor, had given him a knack, which so few painters possess, of catching on canvas the elusive charm of his feminine sitters, of investing with grace those characteristics he professed so much to despise. He had told Hermia Challoner that he did not paint "pretty" portraits, but as Olga knew, it was upon his delineation of beauty, his manipulation of dainty draperies, the sheen of silk and satin, that his reputation so securely rested. It was perhaps merely a contemptuous cleverness which had given him the name among his craft of being a "master brushman."
Into Olga Tcherny's portrait he had put something more of his sitter than usual. He had painted the soul of the girl in the body of the woman of thirty, and if he rendered his subject in a manner more stilted than usual, he repaid her in the real interest with which her portrait was invested. He liked Olga. He had accepted her warily at first until he had proved to his own satisfaction the disinterestedness of her regard and then he had given her his friendship without reserve, his first real friendship with a woman of the world, conscious of the charm of their relation from which all sentiment had been banished.
He had awakened rudely to-night. He was now aware that sentiment on Olga's part had never been banished nor could ever be banished with a woman of her type. He had made the mistake of judging her by the records of their friendship, unmindful of her history as to which he had been forewarned.
To-night the secret was out. The feminine in her had been triumphant. He was a different kind of fish from any she had caught and for reasons of her own she wanted him. She had been playing him skillfully for months, giving him all the line in her reel that he might be hooked the more easily. And to what end? Their friendship had fallen into shreds. What was to follow?
Of one thing he was certain. He was learning something, also progressing. In the twelve hours that had passed he had kissed two women—something of a record for a man of his prejudices. He rose and threw the unsatisfactory cigarette into the bushes. It was high time he was making his way back to Thimble Island and solitude.
There was a rustle of silk behind him, and he turned.
"Oh, do stay, Mr. Markham. I was just coming out to talk to you."