“It is one of the best places,” said Charlie.
The elder Cartaret wrote a check.
“Take a boat to-morrow,” he ordered. “I’ll pay your board and tuition for two years: that’s time enough to learn any business. After two years you’ll have to make out for yourself.”
So Charlie had worked hard for two years. That period ended a week ago, and his uncle’s checks ended with it. He had stayed on and hoped. To-day he had carried a picture through the rain to Seraphin’s benefactor, the dealer Fourget; and the soft-hearted Fourget had bought it. Cartaret, on his return, met Houdon in the lower hall and before the American was well aware of it, he was pledged to the feast of which Maurice was bragging to Dieudonné.
Charlie dug into his pocket and fished out all that was in it: a matter of two hundred and ten francs. He counted it twice over.
“No use,” he said. “I can’t make it any larger. I wonder if I ought to take a smaller room.”
Certainly there was more room here than he wanted, but he had grown to love the place: even then, when he had still to see it in the rose-pink twilight of romance, in the afterglow that was a dawn—even then, before the apparition of the strange Lady—he loved it as his sort of man must love the scenes of those struggles which have left him poor. Its front windows opened upon the street full of student-life and gossip, its rear windows looked on a little garden that was pretty with the concierge’s flowers all Summer long and merry with the laughter of the concierge’s children on every fair day the whole year round. The light was good enough, the location excellent; the service was no worse than the service in any similar house in Paris.
“But I have been a fool,” said Cartaret.
He looked again at his money, and then he looked again about the room. The difference between a fool and a mere dilettante in folly is this: that the latter knows his folly as he indulges it, whereas the former recognizes it, if ever, only too late.
“If I’d been able to study for only one year more,” he said.