It had been a white night that had passed between his conversation with Mrs. Stewart and his departure from St. Andrews. He had lain awake listening to the hissing of the sea over the rocks, and recounting the arguments that affected his feelings toward Miss Ware. Now, it had seemed to him that she represented for him the one chance of happiness; that the touch of sadness that had come to her would make her but the more merciful to his own past. Then, again, the old bitterness, the old distaste came; he could not escape the thought that the old conventions teach, that one step aside means, for the woman, eternal disgrace. Well, and even if the old conventions said so a thousand times, were they to bind him now, when they had so long been thrust away by him in scorn? At any rate, the torment of these conflicting thoughts was to be avoided. He must decide upon one attempt or another—the return home and the repetition of a certain question, or the effort to continue more steadfast than ever in the philosophy of laughter.
He decided for the return to America.
No boat left Liverpool for two days. In the interval he roamed about the most beautiful city in Scotland, enjoying the memories and pictures of the past that Holyrood, the old Castle, and John Knox's house brought up. The autumn sun turned Prince's Street Gardens, and the Scott Monument into a green and gold and flowered picture that he remembered no equal to, in his wanderings through the capitals of Europe, Prince's Street, he maintained, was the prettiest thoroughfare in the world. He left it with regret.
His voyage across the Atlantic merely gave him material for a study of the gowns adopted by the fair ocean travelers, and several chances for cynical representations of the humors of upper-deck flirtations. Otherwise his journey was as monotonous as the luxuriance of the modern travel could make it.
It was morning, when after another fatiguing journey by rail, he reached the metropolis that held so many mixed memories for him. He went straight to the Philistine club, and took some rooms there. The servants hardly knew him. He had, it was true, changed a great deal. He was browner, thinner; there were deep lines about his eyes and mouth.
The first man he met in the smoking-room, after he had refreshed himself with a bath and a lunch, was Vanstruther.
"Why," said that gentleman, after a long, puzzled look, "dashed if it isn't Dick Lancaster!" "Come into the light, most noble genius, and let me gaze upon you. You—you put bright crimson tints on all the effete European cities, didn't you? I declare it's good to see you again! You've seemed a good deal like a myth lately, you know; no one ever seemed to know just where you were, or whether you were alive at all."
They walked up and down the room, asking and answering such pleasant questions as come between two familiars after a long absence.
"Oh, there's not much change," Vanstruther was explaining, "except in yourself. You'll be no end of a lion, I'm afraid. Have to do a couple of paragraphs about you myself, just to scoop the other fellows. Give me a text or two. Oh, but you have hit the fad in the exact centre, somehow! I'm not saying a thing against the real value of your stuff, but the fact remains that this whole blessed nation is fad-mad just now, and it simply has got to have a fad or quit. Your European reputation came along just about the time the fad for the newest English novel was dying. You went, so to say, with a whoop. One can't pick up a Sunday paper now but what one finds weird, impossible interviews with you; descriptions of your favorite models, or reproductions of your newest sketch. You are depicted as the founder of a new style; they talk of women as being "Lancaster-like," and you are a pest generally. In print, I mean, of course, only in print. You are about to furnish my own dear self with material for about a column, so I shouldn't call you a pest; but from the standpoint of the reader, rather than the penny-a-liner, I abhor you!" He made a gesture of aversion, laughingly.
"You want to know about the old guard, do you? Well, Stanley is still the same dismal distiller of cynicisms that he ever was; his trip abroad only seems to have made him worse. Belden? Oh, he plods along in the same old way, drawing bloody battles for the dailies, and making all creation look like the prize-ring 'toughs.' We have the same old Sunday evenings up at his house, too; his wife's turned out well, as far as one can see. He certainly doesn't look unhappy. We were all up there not long ago, Marsboro, Stanley and myself. Mind you, I never take Mrs. Van. I'm about the same as ever, too. I've got a blood-curdling dime-novel on the stocks just now, and the 'season' is beginning for the winter, so I'm not likely to have much time for idle trifling for a while. Oh,—did you see Mrs. Stewart while you were abroad? Thanks! That'll be another scoop on the rest of the society editors. Hallo! three o'clock,—got to be off to the office—see you again!" He rushed off, leaving Lancaster smiling at his frank, jerky sentences.