“Then permit me,” Houdon condescended, “to order a bock. For the three of us.” He generously included the hungry Seraphin. “Come, we shall drink to your better fortune next time.”
But Cartaret excused himself. He said that he had an engagement with a dealer, which was not true, and which was understood to be false, and he went into the street.
The last of the rain, unnoticed during Cartaret’s fevered play, had passed, and a red February sun was setting across the Seine, behind the higher ground that lies between L’Etoile and the Place du Trocadero. The river was hidden by the point of land that ends in the Quai D’Orsay, but, as Cartaret crossed the broad rue de Vaugirard, he could see the golden afterglow and, silhouetted against it, the high filaments of the Eiffel Tower.
What an ass he had been, he bitterly reflected, as he passed again through the Luxembourg Gardens, where now the statues glistened in the fading light of the dying afternoon. What a mad ass! If a single stroke of almost pathetically small good luck made such a fool of him, it was as well that his uncle and not his father had come into a fortune.
His thought went back with a new tenderness to his father and to his own and his sister Cora’s early life in that small Ohio town. He had hated the dull routine and narrow conventionality of the place. There the most daring romance of youth had been to walk with the daughter of a neighbor along the shaded streets in the Summer evenings, and to hang over the gate to the front yard of the house in which she lived, tremblingly hinting at a delicious tenderness, which one never dared more adequately to express, until a threatening parental voice called the girl to shelter. His life, since those days, had been more stirring, and sometimes more to be regretted; but he had loved it and thought it absurd sentiment on Cora’s part to insist that their tiny income go to keeping up the little property—the three-story brick house and wide front and back-yard along Main Street—which had been their home. Yet now he felt, and was half ashamed of feeling, a strong desire to go back there, a pull at his heartstrings for a return to all that he was once so anxious to quit forever.
He wondered if it could be possible that he was tired of Paris. He even wondered if it were possible that he could not be a successful artist—he had never wanted to be a rich one—whether the sensible course would not be to go home and study law while there was yet time....
And then——
Then, in the rose-pink twilight, the beginning of the Dream Wonderful: that scent of the roses from the sky; that quick memory of sunlight upon snow-crests; that first revelation of the celestial Lady transfiguring the earthly commonplace of his room!