He did not mention having met any girls, nice or otherwise, when he wrote again. He did say that he was enjoying his work and that he had begun to feel a certain affection for Paris—particularly after he had been away travelling in Germany, Spain and Italy. Really, he admitted, it was like coming home. The usual was still happening to James Cleland.
He had an apartment, now, overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. He had friends to dinner sometimes. There was always plenty to do. Life had become very inspiring. The French theatres were a liberal education; French literature a miracle of artistic clarity and a model for all young aspirants. In fact, the spring source of all art was France, and Paris the ornamental fountain jet from which flashed the ever-living waters that all may quaff.
Very pretty. He did not add that some of the waters were bottled and kept in pails of chopped ice. He wrote many gracefully composed pages—when he wrote at all—concerning the misty beauty of the French landscape and the effect of the rising sun of Notre Dame. He had seen it rise several times.
But, on the whole, he behaved discreetly and with much circumspection; and within his youthful heart lay that deathless magic of the creative mind which transmutes leaden reality into golden romance—which is blind to the sordid and which transforms it into the picturesque.
A saucy smile from a pretty girl on an April day germinated into a graceful string of verses by night; a chance encounter by the Seine, a laugh, a gay adieu—and a delicate short story was born, perhaps to be laboured over and groomed and swaddled and nourished into life—or to be abandoned, perhaps, in the back yard of literary débris.
Life ran evenly and pleasantly for Cleland in those deathless days—light, happy, irresponsible days when idleness becomes saturated with future energy unawares; when the seeds of inspiration fall thicker and thicker and take root; when the liberality, the vastness, and the inspiration of the world begin to dawn upon a youthful intellect, not oppressively, but with a wide and reassuring kindliness.
There was a young girl—very pretty, whose loneliness made her not too conventional. After several encounters on the stairs, she smiled in response; and they crossed the Luxembourg Gardens together, strolling in the chestnut shade and exchanging views of life.
The affair continued—charming and quite harmless—a touch of tragedy and tears one evening—and the boy deeply touched and temporarily in love—in love with love, temporarily embodied in this blue-eyed, white-skinned, slender girl who had wandered with him close to the dead line and was inclined to cross it—with him.
He had a delightfully wretched hour of renunciation—and was rewarded with much future material, though he didn't know it at the time.
There were tears—several. It is not certain that she spiritually appreciated the situation. That sort of gratitude seldom is genuine in the feminine heart.