“Oh, yes, I forgot that was her Christian name. So now you understand why I may not wish to part with this picture. If anyone has it it shall be you, if you don’t change your mind.”
“Change my mind! It’s not a thing I used often to do, but I seem always to be at it now. I meant to go up to town this morning, but didn’t. If I’d intended to come here, ten to one I should have run up to town. I’m too young to be growing old, but I feel deuced old all the same, at times.”
He was again strolling vaguely about the room, now pausing to look at a sketch, now glancing out of the window at the undulating stretch of green down.
“You look just as young as the first day I met you,” he continued; “haven’t changed a hair. I suppose it’s care that kills men as well as cats. There’s more real care in a successful career than in a failure. A small shopkeeper can’t lose much, and doesn’t run many risks. Now I—why, good Lord! I may go bust—sky high—any day. Big business is all a big gamble, the margin between a huge profit and a huge loss is so small—a puff of wind, and over you go on the money side. Now you—you’re above fate now; you’re known; competition can never touch you; the speculation is entirely on the part of those who buy your pictures. In a hundred years they may be worth thousands or nothing. Yes, you’re a lucky devil.”
“Luck. Do you believe in luck?”
“Luck? It’s the only real thing in the world. It rules the world! Believe in it? Of course I do. I shouldn’t ever have been anything more than a small shopkeeper if I hadn’t been lucky. I inherited a tiny corner shop in a back street; fate—or the Metropolitan Board of Works—decided to drive a new thoroughfare past my place. Wasn’t that luck? Isn’t marriage all a matter of luck? What man can know anything at all about his wife, until she is his wife and free to show him her real self? Luck! I never trust the man who sneers at luck and talks about the reward of honest labor; he’s a liar or a fool, both equally bad to deal with in business.”
“I don’t believe in luck. Which am I, knave or fool?”
“Oh, you’re an artist, and the artistic temperament covers a multitude of eccentricities.”
The hooting of a motor-horn drew him to the window again, from which a glimpse of the road could be seen.
“Hullo! Here’s Alice and Agatha, early birds too. But she’s come to bully you into starting the portrait. Are you going to do it?”