In his friends too he was happy—a few men different from himself and from each other—and to these he clung loyally. But the conditions of his life removed him from feminine influences. Beyond those girls in his immediate family circle, whom he called by their Christian names and treated with an old-fashioned, brotherly protection, scolding them when they did foolish things, such as wearing light shoes in wet weather, performing little services for them when they behaved themselves nicely, he never troubled his head about womankind.
On the night when Clytie's curtains caught fire he had been on his way to visit a coterie of three bachelor friends who shared a house in South Kensington. They were accustomed to his nocturnal appearances, and the worse the night and the later it grew the more likely was Kent to present himself at the sitting-room door, a dripping, ruddy apparition, his cheeks and beard glistening with raindrops. And then he would throw off his mackintosh, call for slippers, and join the circle round the fire. The thoughts of the dreary tramp home between two and three never seemed to dismay him. Cheerlessness of environment in no way affected his happiness.
They formed the chief part of his social life, these three friends, tried by the changes in fibre, tastes, affinities, that over half a score of years effect. There was Fairfax, the doctor, ruddy, full-blooded, magnetic with health and vitality, whose brass plate shone huge on the front door, inviting confidence; Greene, the solicitor, shrewd, hard-headed, a speaker of few words; and Wither, the civil servant, the little gnomelike man, full of strange sayings, whimsical, non-moral, a man of boyish, elfin beauty, trusted by men, petted by women. Of the three Kent loved Wither best. Wither saw deeper into the world's mysteries than he, but his own sturdy honest sense had kept the other from many an abyss.
After bidding Clytie good-night, Kent stood irresolute on the landing. Should he wrap the remains of his waterproof around him, and still go whither his truest happiness had hitherto always led him? Considerations of the chill, sleeting night and the throbbing pain in his hand went for nothing in his decision. The girl who had tended the burn had almost besought him not to go out. To disregard her would be an act of discourtesy. Thus thought honest Kent as he turned on his heel and slowly mounted the stair. But his evening had been spoiled, he told his briarwood pipe, with a consoling sense of martyrdom, and the cause thereof was feminine.
“It is just the silly sort of thing that Agatha would do,” he said to himself.
Agatha was his sister, whom he pitied intensely for being a woman. He thought of Clytie's pictures, the signs of virility in them, and he began to pity Clytie too. Yet there was a difference of kind in his sentiments. He pitied his sister for being constrained to ambitionless-ness and futility; he was sorry for the handicap of sex to Clytie's ambitions.
In some such attitude of mind towards her he knocked at the studio door the following afternoon. It is true that a warning throb of the bourgeois in him, that still sometimes mutely guided the Bohemian along certain tracks, had made him consider for a vague moment the correctness of calling so immediately upon Clytie; but the directness and simplicity of his nature disregarded it. It was only natural that Clytie should like to know how his burned hand was faring.
He found the girls busily painting, Winifred at the side, with her basket of flowers near her, Clytie standing at her easel, in the middle of the room, her back to the door, her face turned half round to see who would enter in response to her call.
On the floor by the fireside sprawled Jack, the model, eating an orange. His face was still dirty, his curly hair matted. Winifred had pathetically besought Clytie to have him washed. Why should his poor little face be all over dirt?
“Because it could not exist without it,” Clytie had answered. “It was so before he was born.”