Charteris had returned to Algiers in the autumn my book was published, but I elected to pass the winter in England. "Of course," was Mr. Charteris's annotation—"because it is precisely the most dangerous spot in the world for you. And you are to spend October at Negley? I warn you that Jasper Hardress is in love with his wife, and that the woman has an incurable habit of making experiments and an utter inability to acquire experience. Take my advice, and follow Mrs. Monteagle to the Riviera, instead. Cissie will strip you of every penny you have, of course, but in the end you will find her a deal less expensive than Gillian Hardress."
"You possess a low and evil mind," I observed, "since I am fond, in all sincerity, of Hardress, whereas his wife is not even civil to me. Why, she goes out of her way to be rude to me."
"Yes," said Mr. Charteris; "but that is because she is getting worried about her interest in you. And what is the meaning of this, by the way? I found it on your table this morning." He read the doggerel aloud with an unkindly and uncalled-for exaggeration of the rhyming words.
"We did not share the same inheritance,—
I and this woman, five years older than I,
Yet daughter of a later century,—
Who is therefore only wearied by that dance
Which has set my blood a-leaping.
"It is queer
To note how kind her face grows, listening
To my wild talk, and plainly pitying
My callow youth, and seeing in me a dear
Amusing boy,—yet somewhat old to be
Still reading Alice Through the Looking-Glass
And Water-Babies…. With light talk we pass,
"And I that have lived long in Arcady—
I that have kept so many a foolish tryst,
And written drivelling rhymes—feel stirring in me
Droll pity for this woman who pities me,
And whose weak mouth so many men have kissed."
"That," I airily said, "is, in the first place, something you had no business to read; and, in the second, simply the blocking out of an entrancingly beautiful poem. It represents a mood."
"It is the sort of mood that is not good for people, particularly for children. It very often gets them shot too full of large and untidy holes."
"Nonsense!" said I, but not in displeasure, because it made me feel like such a devil of a fellow. So I finished my letter to Bettie Hamlyn,—for this was on the seventh,—and I went to Negley precisely as I had planned.
7