“Good Heavens, man, speak out! Have we been friends for fifteen years for nothing?”
“Well, beastliness, however cheap you do it, is costly. Even your magnificent commission has gone down the gutter.”
“It wouldn’t pay either of us for you to return there just now, besides, I want you to come over and stay at my house.”
“I cannot stay in the house with Lady Strange,” said Brydon in a low voice, “I couldn’t. If I am not clean enough to work at my Art I am certainly not fit to eat and drink in her presence. I didn’t stay in my father’s house until my mother and sisters had gone away, and—Lady Strange, somehow, is divine to me. She is always the bride in that picture. I think,” he continued, with a strange softness in his voice, “for all her jeering at me, that I have painted the real woman.”
It was Strange’s turn to wince this time.
“Look here, Strange,” the boy went on, still softly and with lowered head, “I finished that picture before I went into the sty. I wouldn’t have touched her with a dirty brush.”
“My dear fellow, I know it! I should have liked you to have stayed with us. At any rate you will stay in London for a few days; I will be your banker, of course; it will be, after all, only a very trifling increase of your debt to me, and there’s plenty of time to pay that in.”
He took hold of the fellow’s arm and swung him round.
“It’s getting late,” he said, “and I want to see the picture to-night.”
They walked on in silence, the boy’s chivalrous adoration of his wife touched Strange sharply. All the same, he felt vastly inclined to turn round and punch his head for it.