A light wind was blowing through the courtyard. It scattered the pink petals of a too full-blown la France rose upon the garden path. They chased each other round in a little mad dance, first down the path, then in circles at the foot of the statue of a little faun playing on a long thin reed. The faun looked at them with mocking, laughing eyes, while he piped to their dancing.
A thrush in the laburnum tree looked at Barnabas for a moment, but as it had already got used to the fact that he was neither a cat nor a boy with a stone handy, it began to sing a sweet full-throated song.
Barnabas fingered a la France rosebud. There were half a dozen little green blights clinging to the petals. He blew a cloud of tobacco smoke round it. The blights smiled at him, so to speak. It would require something stronger than cigarette smoke to remove them from their lodging. Barnabas let go his hold on the rosebud.
“Hang it all,” he said. “I daresay they’re enjoying life and the sunshine as much as I am. They don’t seem to be hurting the roses, anyhow.”
A couple of white butterflies flew into the garden. One of them settled on the sleeve of his dressing-gown. Barnabas looked at it. It did not move, only its wings quivered a little.
“You morsel of life,” said Barnabas, “you’re enjoying yourself too.”
He felt a sudden odd remorse at the thought of other butterflies he had long ago enclosed in wide-topped bottles filled with camphor, and then pinned down on to pieces of cork. The destructive age had not lasted long with Barnabas. His love of Nature was too whole-hearted and genuine.
The door of studio number seven suddenly opened, and Sally came out in her blue print dress. She held a duster in her hand which she flapped two or three times. The butterfly flew away to perch on the shoulder of the faun.
Sally paused for a moment to sniff the morning air. She did not see Barnabas. She was feeling very happy. She was seventeen, it was eight o’clock on a June morning, and last night she had written to her young man—a stalwart coal-heaver. The letter had been written with a stubby end of pencil on a scrap of paper. The envelope into which she had put it had not stuck well. It had required much pressure from Sally’s thumb. The cleanest thumb will leave a mark on an envelope if it is much rubbed on it. The envelope had looked a little dirty, and Sally had sighed. She felt, however, that the words it contained would more than make up in Jim’s eyes for the smear. Later she would ask leave to go out and buy a stamp.
Then she saw Barnabas. Her work having lain hitherto in the kitchen rather than in the upstair regions, she was not used to the appearance of young men in Turkish dressing-gowns, and she blushed.