“I never was more in earnest in my life. Oh, my love, my love, hasn’t it dawned on you yet what you are to me? Here’s the whole earth in a conspiracy to give you a chill, or run over you, or drench you to the skin, or cheat you out of your money, or let you die of overwork and underfeeding, and I haven’t the mere right to look after you. Why, I don’t even know if you have sense enough to put on warm things when the weather’s cold.”
“Dick, you’re the most awful boy to talk to—really! How do you suppose I managed when you were away?”
“I wasn’t here, and I didn’t know. But now I’m back I’d give everything I have for the right of telling you to come in out of the rain.”
“Your success too?”
This time it cost Dick a severe struggle to refrain from bad words.
“As Mrs. Jennett used to say, you’re a trial, Maisie! You’ve been cooped up in the schools too long, and you think every one is looking at you.
There aren’t twelve hundred people in the world who understand pictures. The others pretend and don’t care. Remember, I’ve seen twelve hundred men dead in toadstool-beds. It’s only the voice of the tiniest little fraction of people that makes success. The real world doesn’t care a tinker’s—doesn’t care a bit. For aught you or I know, every man in the world may be arguing with a Maisie of his own.”
“Poor Maisie!”
“Poor Dick, I think. Do you believe while he’s fighting for what’s dearer than his life he wants to look at a picture? And even if he did, and if all the world did, and a thousand million people rose up and shouted hymns to my honour and glory, would that make up to me for the knowledge that you were out shopping in the Edgware Road on a rainy day without an umbrella? Now we’ll go to the station.”
“But you said on the beach——” persisted Maisie, with a certain fear.