The light in Ewing's eyes changed perceptibly.
"Oh, these women!" grumbled Teevan pleasantly, with the fine, humorous resignation of a persecuted gallant.
"Women—women?" muttered Ewing, slightly aghast. Teevan's heart beat blithely within his breast.
"Silly, romantic fools! What do they see in a man of my years?" He flourished a gesture of magnificent deprecation. "I think I once mentioned a very irksome affair—" How he blessed, now, that bit of boasting, vague and aimless at the time! "The lady, I blush to say it, becomes exigent. But I'm rightly served. Heaven knows I've seen enough of that sort of thing to know how it ends. But come"—he rose to a livelier manner—"I shouldn't bore you with a matter I'm half ashamed of, man of the world as I am. You'll sound the ennui of it, all in your own good time, when you've lost a few of those precious illusions." He broke off to ring, and directed the man to replenish the decanter.
Ewing gazed stupidly at him, failing of speech. The little man drank again when the brandy came, and Ewing wondered if he could be drunk. He feared not. The men he had known in the hills were noisy in drink—they chiefly yelled. And Teevan was quiet. If his eyes stared vacantly at intervals, if he clipped syllables from his words, and seemed to attack his speech with extreme caution, those might be only the results of his emotion. But what monstrous stuff was this he uttered! What unbelievable stuff! In a fever of apprehension he wondered what Teevan would say next.
But the little man dismissed woman, dismissed her with an exquisite shrug, to speak of his young friend's work, and of painting at large.
"A suggestion of the true manner in that late thing of yours, my boy, really, a hint of Dupré, and he was a colorist of the first rank. And there are fewer colorists, genuine masters of tone, than you'd think. Turner was one, to be sure, but Millet had a restricted sense of color. Corot was great only within a narrow range. Rousseau was only a bit broader, robuster. There's a wretchedly defective color sense in many of the old masters, and in heaven knows how many of the young ones. France must take the blame for that, I'm sure you'd agree with me. The academic sentiment there runs to form and against color. They insist that colorists do little work. It's not an unplausible sophism. One has only to begin counting to see that—counting the host of little niggling, mechanical stipplers it's responsible for. It's true, color has its pitfalls and its gins. There's a temptation to shirk form. Many an aspiring colorist has become at last a mushy mannerist, as vicious in his influence as the chaps who never get beyond smart drawing and clever grouping." The little man was "squeezing" his eyes now as if he judged a row of paintings. He talked on and drank frequently.
But Ewing left as soon as he could do so. Teevan pressed his hand with rare cordiality at parting, as if Ewing were one person in the world still worthy of belief. He wandered blindly home, awkwardly trying to mold this new chaos into an understandable scheme of things. He fell instinctively back on his studies of the drama.
Many nights he had sat before the painted curtain to feast a questing mind on the life it lifted to reveal. He had found its revelations more intimate, more specific, than those of the life outside, and he had seemed to learn many things. Lacking this study he would not have divined that actual men and women might be leading lives of domestic adventure, of romantic vicissitude, of sinister intrigue, lives crowded with love and hate and fear and a thousand lawless complexities.
He had studied the street crowds in the light thus thrown on their inner motives. It had been a fine thing to detect the plotting scoundrel under the placid, dissembling mask of some fellow who bought an evening paper and boarded a street car with elaborate airs of innocence; to probe the secret of the unhappy wife whose white face stared blankly from a passing brougham; to identify the handsome but never culpable hero, unconscious of third-act toils tightening about him; to know the persecuted heroine, or the manly but comic chap who loved her with exquisite restraint, divining that she could never be his.