The young man shot into the room, inelegantly performed a step of the Red Mill to a couple of bars of unmelodious song of a like diabolical suggestion, and seated himself on the arm of a chair, twisting both legs over and round the other arm and back. In this grotesque attitude he languidly surveyed his friend, and said sentimentally: ‘I have had a letter from her this morning. She relents, my friend, in long and flowery phrases, with much eloquence spent upon the harshness of destiny and the cruelty of parents. Where would happy lovers be, Armand, if there were no destiny to rail against and no parents to arrange unhappy marriages?’
‘Nowhere, I suppose. Doubtless the parents have the interests of the future lover in view when they chose the unsympathetic husband, and everything is for the best. I congratulate you. For the moment, I am empty-handed, and filled with a sense of the meanness of all things; so I am in a position to give you my undivided attention,’ said Armand dejectedly.
‘What’s this? I come to you, to pour the history of my woes and joys into a sympathetic bosom, and if you had just buried all your near relatives you could not look more dismal.’
‘I should probably feel less dismal, had I done so. But it is a serious matter when your art is scoffed at, and you are told that you imagine yourself a Raphael because you wear a velvet coat and handle a brush.’
‘En effet, that is a much more serious matter,’ Maurice admitted, and at once assumed an appropriate air of concern.
Armand glanced ruefully at his coat sleeve, and began to take off the garment of obloquy with great deliberateness.
‘Spare thyself, my poor Armand, even if others spare thee not. Knowest thou not that the coat is more than half the man? A palette and a velvet coat have ever been wedded, and why this needless divorce?’
‘I will get a blouse like yours, Maurice, and wear it,’ said Armand, with an air of gloomy resignation befitting the occasion.
‘And who has reduced you to these moral straits, and to what deity is the coat a holocaust?’
For answer Armand held out his mother’s letter, which the young man took, and read attentively, with an expression of lugubrious gravity. He lifted a solemn glance upon Armand, and shook his head like a sage.