'By the way, I understand she has become quite an invalid.'
'Has she?' said Fenwick. 'I know nothing of them.'
Watson began to talk of other things. But as he and Fenwick discussed the pictures on the easels, or Fenwick's own projects, as they talked of Manet, and Zola's 'L'Oeuvre,' and the Goncourts, as they compared the state of painting in London and Paris, employing all the latest phrases, both of them astonishingly well informed as to men and tendencies—Watson as an outsider, Fenwick as a passionate partisan, loathing the Impressionists, denouncing a show of Manet and Renoir recently opened at a Paris dealer's—Watson's inner mind was really full of Madame de Pastourelles, and that salon of hers in the old Westminster house in Dean's Yard, of which during so many years Fenwick had made one of the principal figures. It should perhaps be explained that some two years after Fenwick's arrival in London, Madame de Pastourelles had thought it best to establish a little ménage of her own, distinct from the household in St. James's Square. Her friends and her stepmother's were not always congenial to each other; and in many ways both Lord Findon and she were the happier for the change. Her small panelled rooms had quickly become the meeting-place of a remarkable and attractive society. Watson himself, indeed, had never been an habitué of that or any other drawing-room. As he had told Lord Findon long ago, he was not for the world, nor the world for him. But whereas his volatile lordship could never draw him from his cell, Lord Findon's daughter was sometimes irresistible, and Watson's great shaggy head and ungainly person was occasionally to be seen beside her fire, in the years before he left London. He had, therefore, been a spectator of Fenwick's gradual transformation at the hands of a charming woman; he had marked the stages of the process; and he knew well that it had never excited a shadow of scandal in the minds of any reasonable being. All the same, the deep store of hidden sentiment which this queer idealist possessed had been touched by the position. The young woman isolated and childless, so charming, so nobly sincere, so full of heart—was she to be always Ariadne, and forsaken? The man—excitable, nervous, selfish, yet, in truth, affectionate and dependent—what folly, or what chivalry kept him unmarried? Ever since the death of M. le Comte de Pastourelles, dreams concerning these two people had been stirring in the brain of Watson, and these dreams spoke now in the dark eyes he bent on Fenwick.
Presently, Fenwick began to talk gloomily of the death of his old Bernard Street landlady, who had become his housekeeper and factotum in the new Chelsea house and studio, which he had built for himself.
'I don't know what I shall do without her. For eleven years I've never paid a bill or engaged a servant for myself. She's done everything. Every morning she used to give me my pocket-money for the day.'
'The remedy, after all, is simple,' said Watson, with a sudden turn of the head.
Fenwick raised his eyebrows interrogatively.
'I imagine that what Mrs. Gibbs did well, "Mrs. Fenwick" might do even better—n'est-ce pas?'
Fenwick sprang up.
'Mrs.—?' he repeated, vaguely.