"To come back to the pantomime which I saw through the window. It was probably by no means so mysterious in reality as it appeared to me. Yet what could it have been? or, rather, how can I appropriate it for my purposes? I have it! The very situation of looking through a window shall serve as the critical point in my story, only it shall be the hero of my story, and not an idle spectator like myself, who does the looking. The young poet, Wilding in disguise, only walks out at night. He is a shy fellow, who even in public holds his hat, as it were, before his face. He keeps by himself in his garret, brooding over his poems, and seeing no one, until he almost loses the power of ordinary association with other people. When night comes, he walks, sometimes through the night. But his loneliness has generated a desire for companionship which he can satisfy only by ghostly intercourse. So, instead of knowing people, he imagines them, and falls in love with his imaginations. He observes that one house looking toward the sea always keeps its curtains drawn. He falls into the way of stealing by every night to catch a glimpse of a fireside. There he sees a fair girl,—and I may as well draw her portrait like that of my unknown friend,—with eyes that are downcast but when raised suddenly grow large and lustrous, with hands that fold themselves when disengaged, with hair that peeps shyly over the forehead, and with a figure that seems always to be listening. She becomes the world to him. He has renounced all common association with men and women, and he peoples the world which he has thus brushed out with shapes caught from this one girl. The very silence which separates them makes him more quick in his imagination to invest her with the grace which her distant presence never denies."
"Bah! what superfine nonsense I am writing!" exclaimed Buckingham, pushing his note-book aside, but continuing to sit before his fire in revery.
VI.
THE REVERSE SIDE OF THE TAPESTRY.
Mr. Henry Wilding suited himself easily to a room in a house which stood just beyond his cousin's. He wanted little to make him at home; for he had only pitched his tent in this university town, and had no thought of settling in it. His wish was to get what he came for and to go again as little encumbered with baggage as he had come. Something of this sort he had been saying, not long after his established routine had begun, in a letter to the lady to whom he had the good fortune to be engaged. "I never could feel settled so far from you," he went on gallantly; "and I want only so much home at hand as will keep me from daily discontent. So it is exceedingly convenient to have my cousin Julia next door. I feel as one might who lived over a grocery-shop: there would be no fear of starving, at all events. When my supply of family feeling runs low, I drop in upon Julia and lay in enough to last a few days. Her friend, who makes a home with her, of whom I wrote in my last, does not greatly interest me. She says very little; but I am willing to grant that she is uncommonly pretty. I don't know why I say this in such grudging fashion. If some one else be fair to me, what care I how fair this 't other one be? Julia admires her greatly; but I suspect she is one of the kind whom one needs to marry ever to get at. Julia is as much married to her as one woman can be to another; and that explains why she sees so much in her. She sometimes reports scraps of conversations which she has held with this Miss Lillie Vila. Unless Julia makes up both sides of the conversation, her friend certainly is intelligent, and, I am afraid, witty. I say this last because it piques me that I have never extracted any witty remark from her.
"As for John, he is imperturbably good-natured. His profession keeps him away a good deal; but when he is at home he seems to do nothing but read a book by the fireside and chuckle to himself. Julia and Miss Vila both admire him greatly; but I suspect it is necessary to reconstruct him out of imaginary material before one can get to think very highly of him. Women do this naturally. I can always make myself humble by thinking that you do it with me.
"Buckingham is decidedly more interesting. I have not seen him since the evening I called upon him; but as I recall him, his air, his conversation, and the shell of a room which he has been forming about him, I constantly find something new to enjoy. He has a good deal of insight. I am not uncomfortable when I remember how steadily he looked at me; for he is not cynical. Indeed, I should say that he had managed to preserve an unusual amount of sentiment,—more than is generally found in one at his time of life. I am convinced that he ought to marry; and if he ever does, I am sure that he will give up writing stories. He is just one of those men who will find such satisfaction in domestic life as to become indifferent to imaginative experiences. I notice that in his stories he always seems to be groping about for some agreeable domestic conclusion. His room shows it. It looks as if a woman had been in it, but had left before she had put the final touch to it. She ought to come back."
VII.
MR. BUCKINGHAM MAKES A MOVE.
A week after Henry Wilding had called on Austin Buckingham, that gentleman tried to return his call. It must be confessed that his motive was not so much a commendable desire to get even socially with his new acquaintance, nor to give him good advice, as it was to get a nearer view of the heroine of his story. Candor compels me to say that every evening for the week past Buckingham had taken an airing, and always in the same direction. He had always found the shade drawn at No. 17, and often he had caught a glimpse, as he sauntered past, of the figure which he now knew so well. It is true that he had never again seen Miss Vila in so dramatic a character as upon the first evening when he had discovered her en famille; but he had seen her, not as one sees a portrait, which always looks in the same direction. In the horse-car she had been such a portrait to him,—the "Portrait of a Lady Reading." Behind the window of Mr. Martindale's house she had been a figure in a tableau vivant, often animated, always disclosing some new grace of attitude, some new charm of manner. He faintly told himself that these views enabled him to form a more distinct impression of the character of his heroine: whenever he should have his plot ready, his heroine would in the various situations instantly appear to him with the vividness and richness of reality.