‘I cannot conceive how you lived,’ he said, in a voice which had actual pain in it. ‘How can you laugh at it? It is shocking. What were your friends doing to allow——’
‘Oh! my friends were few, and they were all so angry at the course I had taken, that they would have rejoiced in the idea that I was being humbled—that perhaps I should be obliged to return home. But I was going to tell you how we went on—if you want to hear, that is.’
‘Oh, if you will be so good as to tell me!’
‘I had lessons from Wilhelmi; I daresay you know him?’
‘Yes.’
‘He is a splendid fellow, do you know? At first I had great difficulty in getting him to teach me at all. Then he suddenly became quite kind. I believe it was as soon as he saw that I meant work, and not nonsense. He was good enough to say that I had talent, and since then he will accept absolutely nothing from me for my lessons. He says I can give him a service of plate, with inscriptions, when I am a popular painter. Is not that noble generosity?’
‘Very kind,’ assented Falkenberg, almost coldly.
‘And his wife and daughter have been almost as kind as himself. I feel that they are friends indeed.’
‘But your people at home?’ he began.
‘All my “people at home” consist in an uncle, a brother of my mother’s, and his family. My father was professor of modern history at —— College, in London. His opinions, both religious and social, were advanced. When he was living, his house was a favourite place with clever, cultivated men and women, of all shades of opinion; most of them, like himself, not particularly well off. Then he died, suddenly, and left me, as I said, with one hundred pounds a year. I was just one-and-twenty, and my small possessions were fortunately absolutely at my own disposal. I tried living with “my people at home.” My uncle is a clergyman; rector of a very small village in the south of England. They exist there; they don’t live. It soon grew intolerable to me. I had been accustomed to the society of men and women of mind; and the gossip about the curate, and my cousins’ frantic efforts to imitate the dress of the county ladies who occasionally came to church, and who most likely spent as many hundreds on their clothes as Charlotte and Louisa had sovereigns, drove me almost wild. Then the curate tried to convert me——’