"Oh sure! But listen. I've got a plan. Why can't you two make it into a book? It 'ud be perfectly lovely! You know, Mr. Legge, you're quite an artist, aren't you? And Mr. Pedderick here, he does some writing. Oh I'm sure you could do it! You know...." Miss Fraenkel made a pause luminous with bright glances, "a picture of those two, in the café having a dinner; a real kissing picture. I'm sure she would look so sweet!"
"Ah!" said Bill, "but what's the end of the story?"
"Why sure!" faltered Miss Fraenkel. "They get—get married! That's the end of every English story, isn't it?"
Bill cackled from the kitchen, artlessly and shrill. "——and lived happy ever after!" added Miss Fraenkel, with radiant unwinking hazel eyes.
She went away after tea, to her pew in the gaunt wooden Episcopal Church in Chestnut Street, rapt in a felicitous dream of romanticism. It was nothing to her that Mr. Carville had poured diluted vitriol upon some women who clamoured for the vote, nothing that he had barely deigned to notice her existence. Once aware that he essayed to be a spell-binder, she accepted him with utter abandon in that rôle. She permitted him to bind the spell; and as she walked with short quick steps along Van Diemen's Avenue, her brown head held high and unswerving, I could not refrain from the fancy that she moved as one in a trance.
It was a disappointment to us that we heard the whistle of the five o'clock train before we realized that Mr. Carville was on board. The sound was the one thing needful to set our mind and tongues free to talk of him. So potent had been his atmosphere that, to be honest, we had been unable to apply judgment to his case. When we gathered at dinner the discussion was in full and amiable swing.
"It is very difficult," I said, "to distinguish the fact from the fiction, not because he is extraordinarily skilful in 'joining his flats,' but because he is so absorbed in the story himself that it would be quite inconceivable to him that anyone would not be interested. He has evidently never imagined such a contingency. Such ingeniousness is more than uncommon. It is sublime."
"How about your theory that he is an artist?" argued Mac. "He can't be both conscious and unconscious of his art."
"Yes, he can," I replied. "All great artists are. Mind, I don't pretend that Mr. Carville is a great artist. I merely state the fact that he has one of their attributes. I account for it this way. We have here a man of undeniable powers but limited ambition. At certain periods in his life he has been crossed by his remarkable brother, a man whom we now know to have not only brain-power, but will-power. This brother has impressed himself upon our neighbour's imagination. You noticed almost admiration in his voice at times as he spoke of his brother? It has been his whim, therefore, to accentuate as much as possible the difference between them. He has, moreover, cultivated the habit of reticence. Thrown by his profession among men of shrewd wit but imperfect delicacy of mind, he has kept himself to himself. In the course of years it has been almost necessary for him to speak. I can imagine him, a man of quick perceptions, and no mean gift of expression, finding silence becoming an agony. Much brooding has bitten the real and fanciful details of his life into his mind. He has, quite by accident, discovered in us a singularly acceptable audience. Without conscious premeditation he has told us his story. Every narrator of the most trivial incident can induce you to listen for something naïve and individual in his utterance. Most of us disperse this quality over our days. Mr. Carville has secreted it, distilled it to a quintessence, and the result is—well, something in his tone and manner quite unusual."
"Yes, that's all right enough," assented Mac, "but I still don't quite see how his brother couples-up with that chap Cecil wrote about."