“How cruel you are!” she said, with a touch of sadness. “But, after all, your apprehensions are groundless. I have refused.”
“Refused? Why?”
“For reasons of my own,” she replied in a harsh, strained voice. “If—if he speaks to you, urge him to abandon thoughts of love, and regard me as a friend only.”
“You are at least sensible, Ethel,” I said. “It is gratifying to know that you recognise the impossibility of such an union.”
Tears welled in her eyes. She nodded, but did not reply.
A dry, grey day in March. It was “Show Sunday,” that institution in the art world, when the painter opens his studio to his friends and the public, to show them the picture he is about to send to the Academy. The exhibition is in many instances but the showing beforehand of the garlands of victory in a battle which is doomed to be lost, for when the opening day comes, many of the anxious artists do not have the luck to see their pictures hung at all. Then insincere admirers smile in their sleeves at the painter’s chagrin. I have always been thankful that the happy writer of books has no such ordeal to face. He never reads his new romance to his friends, nor do his well-wishers applaud in advance. Reviewers have first tilt at “advance copies,” and very properly.
From morn till eve on “Show Sunday,” Campden Hill is always blocked by the carriages of the curious, and studios are besieged by fashionable crowds, whose chatter and laughter mingles pleasantly with the clinking of tea-cups. On this occasion, as on previous ones, I assisted Dick to receive his visitors, but unfortunately Ethel had been taken suddenly unwell, and could not attend.
My anticipations proved correct. “Circe” was voted an unqualified success. The opinions of critics who dropped in were unanimous that it was the artist’s masterpiece, and that the expression and general conception were marvellous—a verdict endorsed by gushing society women, bored club men, and the inane jeunesse dorée.
A scrap of conversation I overheard in the course of the afternoon, however, caused me to ponder.