CHAPTER XXV
PHYLLIS THE MARTYR!
October had come, still Colonel Lane did not return.
Mr. Burns’s portrait was finished, but Dan was still an inmate of Hawk’s Nest, for not only had Eweretta consented to sit to him for his Madonna, but he had been commissioned by Alvin to do another portrait of her for himself.
Philip had read some chapters of his new novel to the inmates of the White House, as desired, but it had not been received with the enthusiasm he had confidently expected.
In this novel Philip had embodied part of his own story. The first part, dealing with the love romance, was charmingly told, but it went on to show how the hero entered upon a new life after the death of the heroine, and saw that, after all, she would not have been the best wife for him. He needed a woman who could advance his interests—a society personage, and searched for and found her. Now and then some poetic allusion would be made to the first love after the marriage with the lady of quality, but the keynote of the book was, that a marriage of convenience worked best, that early loves were as a beautiful springtime which must give place to summer, and that the summer was the real full life of a man, in which the real purposes of his existence occupied his horizon.
Philip had been disappointed, his vanity had been wounded by the reception his story got at the White House. He had not expected appreciation from the rough Colonial, or from the commonplace Mrs. Le Breton, but he had wrongly imagined that Miss Le Breton would be different. All she had said was that the language was beautiful and that no doubt the story was true to life, but that it was very depressing.
Now Philip considered the book exactly the reverse to depressing. He thought it was inspiriting the way the hero rose above his early sorrow and made a success of his life.
However, after that one evening he did not visit his neighbors. He did not say he would never visit them again, even in his own mind, but he had no inclination to go. He shut himself inside his bungalow, working on and improving his novel. A little later on he meant to spend a few weeks in London. He had done this occasionally for the past few years, and it had been on one of the visits that he had met Eweretta, who was staying with her father at the same hotel.
Shut in the bungalow, Philip often found himself reverting to Aimée Le Breton.
No, he decided, she was not nearly so interesting as he had at first thought her. Moreover, the likeness to Eweretta was only skin deep. In fact, it was scarcely that. This girl had a totally different expression—the outcome of a totally different set of thoughts—from Eweretta.