Lancaster stepped close up to her.
"If I were you," he said quietly, but distinctly, "I should go and look after him. He needs it."
The girl started quickly, turned momentarily pale, and then, seeing who it was, nerved herself to stony calmness. "How dare you?" she said twisting her catalogue into shapelessness.
"Oh," he laughed, "I really mean it for the best. As you see—" he looked sneeringly at the sketch—"he's not the pink of sobriety. And when he drinks, he talks a good deal. He sometimes talks about—you, for instance." He paused and seemed engrossed in nothing save the smoothing out of the wrinkles in his gloves.
"You coward!" If intention could have killed, Miss Tremont's eyes committed murder.
"True; I fear for you both. And I take such an interest in you! But I believe he will make an excellent husband—for you!" He lifted his hat, with a fleeting mockery of a smile, and left her before the picture, staring, trembling.
"That," he told himself, "was wanton brutality number two. But she should not have judged me!"
He left the galleries, taking with him a feeling of scorn for himself, that he should have put himself on the level of the praise or blame of the fadists in such a public way. Yet, he reflected, it had been not of his own seeking.
The afternoon was already touched with the darkening shadow of evening. The town roared and hissed and seethed in all it's wonted fervor; the chill-hardness of its material manners were painfully evident to Lancaster as he came from the comparative quiet of the picture-galleries. He contrasted the grim roar of the place with the smiling, careless, jovial glitter of those other towns he had lately enjoyed; for the bright cheer of the boulevards and the gardens and the open-air café's he found the skypiercing buildings that shut out the sun-light, hemmed in masses of money-mad humanity, and extended apparently to all the horizons. For the strolling gayety he had grown to love so; for the ever-changing current of picturesque triflers, idlers and dandies,—he had received in exchange a breathless surge of anxious, nervous, straining men and women, plunging wildly down the slopes to an imaginary sea of gold. Something of the old repulsion made itself felt in him; he foresaw that it would never again be possible for him to endure life here. That other glittering, careless, joyous maelstrom,—perhaps; this one, never! He realized that while for future generations it was possible, for himself the hope of finding an American metropolis tinged with aught but the feverish strivings after riches was utterly vain. He tried to argue with himself about it; to persuade himself that it was a nobler sign, this one of the masses all honest in labor and in pursuit of it's fruits, than the evidences of inherited wealth, or quiet content with small means, that were the prevailing notes of older countries. But he failed. His temperament rebelled; he loved the smooth, the finished sides of life; the artist in him rebelled against the commercialism of his native haunts. If it should be the decree of fate that he continue to seek out life's most distracting enchantments, he would certainly have to bid his native land farewell again. If there were anything else in store for him; if it happened that he be required by Dame Chance to do something more serious than to laugh, to laugh, and laugh—well, that consideration would bear postponement.
It seemed to him, as he walked through the streets that were now beginning to glitter with the white and yellow lights born of electricity and gas, that these faces were the same faces always, that there was never any change, from year to year, in the puppets that paraded on this urban stage. A thousand differing types, to be sure; but always the same in their hard, tense, sinister look of restraint; all wore the same tiring eyes, the same rounded shoulders. The same fierce passion for excitement swam in the eyes of the women. In his morbidness he fancied that it was as if all these city-dwellers were life-prisoners, condemned forever to walk, and mumble and laugh shrilly.