“Mayn’t I write?”
“No, Olive would see the letter.”
The footsteps passed by.
He looked back in reluctant farewell, as he fumbled at the door-handle. She was close behind him.
She opened her arms, and his head was on her breast again. “Oh, my dear, my dear,” she murmured, “it is hard to wait.”
Then she pushed him outside, her face grown spiritual again in its anxiety, and she slammed the door, and he reeled like a drunken man.
Her last look haunted him—soulful, alluring, intoxicating. He was almost sobbing with happiness. Heaven had been kind to him at last. The balmy air of the court-yard fanned his brow. He walked on aimlessly, in a beatific dream, past the beautiful Ionic portico, through the corridor, into the street, no longer grimy, and so on to the Boulevards.
How happy the world was! How the sunshine streamed with its dancing motes! How gay the kiosks with their dainty posters and the piquant designs of great caricaturists laughing from the front pages of the illustrated journals! How light-hearted those bourgeois drinking red wine at the al fresco tables! What a jolly, bulbous-nosed old cabman that was who hailed him, not knowing he had quicksilver in his veins, and must needs give his limbs to lively motion. He sauntered on at random, buoyant, treading on sunbeams, a song at his heart, breathing in the sense of the spacious, airy city that sparkled in the spring sunshine, mother of nimble spirits; he crossed the river, glittering in a long sweep, with Notre Dame rising on its island in picturesque antiquity; the book-stalls on the quays thrilled him with a remembrance of the joys of reading; he strode on humming a merry tune, the bustle of traffic was a musical accompaniment to it; he stopped at a great leafy square, alive with pedestrians, to watch the limpid water leaping from a beautiful fountain; around him were the seductive programmes of theatres, eloquent of artistic acting, of fine comedy, of poetic tragedy. He strolled along, absorbing noble buildings, and churches, and splendid public monuments. How fair life was, how marvellously compacted! Gladness was at the heart of all things.
The city passed into his soul as never before; its radiant message of elegance, proportion, style, sanity, unity, lucidity, exquisite sensibility to the material, balanced by an æsthetic delight in ideas, and the spirit of gayety all over; henceforth, thanks to Eleanor, he would be of it, following Art for the joy of Art, out of the happiness of the soul, sun-clear, without stagnant vapors of discontent, those fits of spleen bred of foggy, uncouth London; he would be fixed at last, swinging steadily on a pivot of happiness, a lover of life and a praiser thereof. All its sweetness had been diverted from him—it had passed to others. Now at last he would be self-centred. He rambled on, he crossed the Pont Passy, and saw the old city rising quaint and steep in wooded terraces. Oh, love and life! Oh, life and love! Why had people besmirched the Creation with soilures of cynicism, plaguing the air with pessimistic laments, graceless grunts of swine nosing garbage?
What good times he had had himself, he who had won fame and gold while still young! And how ungraciously he had accepted these gifts of the gods, mewling and whining like a sulky child. Surely he deserved that hell allotted in Dante for those who had wilfully lived in sadness. The gracious romance of life—that was what his Art should henceforth interpret. He began to dream beautiful masterpieces, and they reminded him that he had come to see the Salon. He retraced his steps towards the Champs Elysées, watching the endless procession of elegant equipages rolling steadily to and from the Bois, with their panorama of luxurious women. He entered the Salon; the pictures delighted him, the crowd enraptured him, a young girl’s face stirred him to a mood of paternal benediction; he met Edward Cornpepper, A.R.A., there, and felt the little man was his dearest friend. Cornpepper introduced him to his newly-acquired wife, who said the Exhibition was indecent.