Fairfax, meanwhile, finished his statuette and decided to send it to an exhibition of sculpture to be opened in the Rue de Sèvres. He had bitterly renounced his worldly life, and was shortly obliged to pawn his dress suit, and, indeed, anything else that the young men could gather together went to the Mont de Piété, and once more the comrades were nearly destitute and were really clad and fed by their visions and their dreams.
"You see," he said one day, shortly, to Dearborn, when the silence between the quays and the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne had grown intolerable to him, "you see how indifferent she is. She doesn't know what has become of me. For all she knows I may be drowned in the Seine."
"Or imprisoned for debt," said Dearborn, cheerfully, "that's more likely. The tailor doesn't believe you have gone to London, Fairfax. Try a more congenial place, Tony. Let it be Monte Carlo next time—every one goes there sooner or later."
When he came back from Versailles he told Dearborn nothing about his escapade in detail, simply mentioning
the fact that he had taken out a little girl to spend the day in the woods and that she had bored him in the end, and that he had had the misfortune to meet Mrs. Faversham unexpectedly.
Dearborn was one of those subtle spirits who do not need to be told everything. He rated Antony for playing what he called an ungallant part to the little Bohemian.
"You say her hair was like chrysanthemums and that she had violet eyes? Why, she is a priceless treasure, Tony! How could you desert her?"
And several times Dearborn tried to extract something more about the deserted little girl from his friend, but it was in vain.
"I am sorry," Dearborn said. "We need women, Tony—we need to see the flutter of their dresses, to watch them come and go in this little room. By Jove, I often want to open the door and invite up the concierge, the concierge's wife, his aunt 'and children three' or any, or all of Paris who would come and infuse new life into us. Anything that is real flesh and blood, to chase for a moment visions and dreams away and let us touch real hands."
"You don't go out enough, old man."