“Why don’t you call me a Decadent at once—an artificer of phrase—an exhausted idealist? That’s what your criticism comes to. You feel that I’m on the down grade, and you don’t like to tell me.”
“Oh, no, Hugh!” she expostulated. “Much of it is as exquisite as ever. But I love all your work to be exquisite. It’s only here and there that the meaning is not quite clear and the language appears forced.”
She exerted herself to heal his wounded susceptibilities. But her criticism had sunk deep. It was true. He was on the down grade, in every sphere. Hampered with debt, losing his hold on the sympathies of juries, his poetical vein worked out, he saw exaggerated ruin staring him in the face. He had sowed the wind, was about to reap the inevitable harvest. The high-spirited man, half ashamed of his life, often loses sense of proportion. A Gewitter—or concentration of bad weathers—as the Germans appropriately name a storm, had temporarily gathered about him, and he mistook it for the destroying whirlwind. Meanwhile Minna came to his chambers, wove her Morganesque spells about his senses, provoking, seductive, tempting, sympathetic, instinctively bringing him to the brink of the false depths in her nature, cunningly clinking her money-bags in his ear.
One afternoon he met Gerard at the club in St. James’s Street, to which both belonged. They were to dine together, later, with some friends. The talk had turned to domestic affairs. Irene, not being able as yet to find a suitable home for her rescued waif, was keeping her in the house; in fact was growing attached to the child.
“That’s the devil of it,” said Gerard, “when once Irene attaches herself to a thing, nothing can make her let go.”
“Why should she?” asked Hugh, shortly.
Gerard lay back in his chair and watched the blue wreaths rising from his pipe. Then he said, slowly:
“There are occasions when it’s awkward. Sometimes I wish Irene were not so strenuous.”
“Confound it, man!” cried Hugh. “How can you, of all men, disparage her?”
Irene’s husband looked at him queerly out of the corner of his eye.