CHAPTER III
IN WHICH A FOOL AND HIS MONEY ARE SOON PARTED
Money’s the still sweet-singing nightingale.—Herrick: Hesperides.
Seraphin Dieudonné told the truth: at that moment Charlie Cartaret—for all this, remember, preceded the coming of the Vision—at that moment Cartaret was seated in his room in the rue du Val-de-Grâce, wondering how he was to find his next month’s rent. His trouble was that he had just sold a picture, for the first time in his life, and, having sold it, he had rashly engaged to celebrate that good fortune by a feast which would leave him with only enough to buy meals for the ensuing three weeks.
He was a rather fine-looking, upstanding young fellow of a type essentially American. In the days, not long distant, when the goal at the other end of the gridiron had been the only goal of his ambition, he had put hard muscles on his hardy frame; later he had learned to shoot in Arizona; and he even now would have looked more at home along Broadway or Halsted Street than he did in the rue St. Jacques or the Boulevard St. Michel. He was tow-haired and brown-eyed and clean-shaven; he was generally hopeful, which is another way of saying that he was still upon the flowered slope of twenty-five.
Cartaret had inherited his excellent constitution, but his family all suffered from one disease: the disease of too much money on the wrong side of the house. When oil was found in Ohio, it was found in land belonging to his father’s brother, but Charlie’s father remained a poor lawyer to the end of his days. Uncle Jack had children of his own and a deserved reputation for holding on to his pennies. He sent his niece to a finishing-school, where she could be properly prepared for that state of life to which it had not pleased Heaven to call her, and he sent his nephew to college. When the former child was finished, he found her a place as companion to an ancient widow in Toledo and dismissed her from his thoughts; when Charlie was through with college—which is to say, when the faculty was through with him for endeavoring to plant a fraternity in a plot of academic soil that forbade the seed of Greek-letter societies—he asked him what he intended to do now—and asked it in a tone that plainly meant:
“What further disgrace are you planning to bring upon our name?”
Charlie replied that he wanted to be an artist.
“I might have guessed it,” said his uncle. “How long’ll it take?”
Young Cartaret, knowing something about art, had not the slightest idea.
“Well,” said the by-product of petroleum, “if you’ve got to be an artist, be one as far away from New York as you can. They say Paris is the best place to learn the business.”