"The Soul of Me."

"Oh, love's but a dance,Where time plays the fiddle."

She was constitutionally a matchmaker, and though recognising the infirmity was not without its advantages, I refused to be made an accessory after the fact. I declined to lend myself to the introduction of my best masculine friend, Lorraine, to my best feminine one, Clair Conway. There was no petty jealousy at bottom of the dissent, for sixty winters had rolled over this philosophic head; it was merely that I shirked the responsibility of meddling with Fate.

But my sister, Sarah Sargent, had no such qualms. "Matchmaker!" she exclaimed. "Perhaps so—a woman without romance is like an exotic without scent; and what woman could know a lovely girl, and a man who is intellectually gifted and eligible to boot, without planning to introduce them?"

About Clair Conway's beauty there admitted little dispute, though it was complex to apprehend. Every feature was in drawing, but nowhere arrogantly classical. A faint scumbling, which poets might have described as the mists of youth's Aurora, endowed the face with a soothing indefinitude. In effect, it acted like dew on summer turf which drapes the emerald crispness in silver sheen. The only obvious irregularity was a contumacious tooth which peeped impertinently over the centre of the lower lip, dimpling its fulness with a tiny shadow. In that dimple lurked the most fascinating lisp that was ever modelled—a lisp not sufficiently full-bodied to disturb the accent, but strong minded enough to put stress upon it. Her figure was in the bud. It had small natural curves, which hinted at feminality, but it was fitted far too well; the tailor had forced a masculine exactness which was foreign to the subject and to the statuesque creasings of her neck.

To me from her youth she had always been a centre of interest. She was like some half-studied volume ofbelles lettres—full of temptations, subtleties, prose melodies, poeticrealisms. Her speech was fragile, and her words, subdued by their passage through the dimple, lagged now and then. Her expression was seldom either animated or pensive; never did green and yellow melancholy chase the vermeil from her cheek, seldom did excitement heighten it. She was as serene as innocence and as clean-eyed, the very woman I would have worshipped had youth quickened in my veins.

"I knew Philip would admire her," my sister related, when describing the kettledrum she had given in furtherance of her scheme, "so I introduced them at once!"

"Lorraine's fancies are protean, my good Sarah. They are the result of appreciative faculty. Someone—I think Emerson—says that 'love is a mutual perception of the same truth,' or something to that effect. Unfortunately, as the artist soul is always in pursuit of new truths, the deduction is perilous."

"But," argued she, "Clair is the white light of truth itself. One might go about studying nuances, contrasting tones, and yet value that truth eternally. I expected MrLorraine would appreciate her for this reason. He is a colour theorist, and with his knowledge of values he can gauge the true beauty of white light."

"Well, and the result?" I questioned, with interest; for I myself had seen him spy out Clair from among crowds of women, watched his eyes lean on her, on the picturesque brim of her hat and the curling feathers which insinuated themselves against the contour of her transparent ear, but had afterwards escaped to avoid participation in Sarah's plot.

"They seemed designed for each other," my sister pursued, "and I introduced them, quite informally, of course. All the girls had appropriate cavaliers, and I started some music to give a spurt to the conversation."

"Music is certainly an excellent dam for discoursive shallows," I muttered in soliloquy.

"Whether the introduction pleased her or not," she continued, heedless of my remark, "I could scarcely observe. She is an equable enigma."

"A puzzle that is a wonder rather than a challenge," I agreed. "And Lorraine?"

"He, with his whole soul—and not a driblet of it as usual—beaming in his eyes faced her on the ottoman. The light from the hanging lamp treated him kindly. It threw some ripples on the silvery edge of his hair, and shrouded the cynical depths of his eyes in pensive shadow."

"If you were a younger woman, Sarah, I should say you were in love with him yourself."

"You may say what you please. He had dropped his eye-glass—his solace in boredom, as you know—and was listening, interestedly listening, while she talked."

"Perhaps you exaggerated his interest?"

"No; there is a way of listening with the eyes as well as with the ears. I could see his fixed on the lisp dimple as it dipped. Then the music began; I turned over the leaves, and struggled to applaud, flatter, question, but my brain was with them."

"Much better have left them alone," I grunted.

"After all, they are your best friends—he is your prince of poets, and she is your ideal heroine."

"One does not express friendship by laying traps—but go on," I urged, curious in spite of myself.

"Tea was distributed, and, either from laziness or diplomacy, Philip never vacated his perch. He sat intently watching her while she dipped inquiring fingers into each tier of the muffinière, and piled a huge meal on the Japanese plate at her elbow. She seemed bent on advertising a Cassowary digestion."

"An implied antithesis to poetic ideals," I volunteered, to enhance my sister's discomfiture.

"Perhaps so," owned Sarah, vexedly. "Girls are very contrary. But," she continued, "he perseveringly looked on with his quaint air of critical inquiry while she spread her handkerchief upon her lap, distending every corner in ostentatious preparation for her feast."

"Talking to him meanwhile?"

"Yes,par parenthese—between the nibbles at a chocolate bouchée, an anchovy muffin, two biscuits, and a tartine."

"My good Sarah, it is scarcely hospitable to register the appetites of your guests."

"I was really burning to hear them talk, but Percy Vansittart buttonholed me to say the muffinière had run short of supplies. We rang for a fresh consignment, then more music was proposed. I induced Vaudin to sing those exquisite verses of Philip's—about the poet's tears, you know, which froze to pearls on the neck of the woman he loved."

"Just the thing to annoy Lorraine!"

"He ought to have been highly flattered. At the end of the song," Sarah pursued, "people began to go, and I thought I would take a seat in their direction without disturbing the conversation."

"In fact you played the eavesdropper?"

"I merely wanted to catch some stray sentence as guide to the situation. Had I feltde tropI should have moved. I approached cautiously and affected to be busy with plates and dishes on a neighbouring table. Philip's attitude was full of interest—he was intent on some argument apparently.

"'I believe a pin is the orthodox weapon,' I heard him saying with questioning eagerness; to which Clair replied, 'Take my advice next time and try a darning-needle.'

"A darning-needle! My curiosity was aroused, and, as the subject seemed to admit of invasion I adroitly wedged in.

"'A darning-needle? for what?'

"'Oh,' she exclaimed withempressement, 'we were talking of periwinkles—discussing the efficacy of pinsversusdarning-needles—what do you say?'"

After the routing of my sister Sarah, I should have given up interest in her proceedings had not a letter from Clair reached me. It referred to a commission for book illustrations that I had secured for her. From this she volunteered her own patch of information—a crudely-contrastive one, but not without its value in the harmonious scheme.

"To-day," she wrote, "I was introduced to yourrara avis, Philip Lorraine. Lady Sargent cannot praise him enough. Continued praise of one individual to another is boring, don't you think so? It is a moral throwing of the gauntlet. Besides, I always suspect the dear creature of designs. Somethingabout her mode of introduction is Autolycus like; one feels like a pedlar's pack with all its little trinkets and tawdrinesses spread out for the buyer. Ah, you don't know your sister. To me she is a dear transparent soul with her whole purport printed on the surface like a sandwich board. She thinks the woman world is ranged in three tiers—the top story for eighteen-year-olds. Everything there must be out on approval. It's no good ticketing yourself 'Not for sale,' nor even pricing yourself at a prohibitive figure—no good whatever. She brings round her customers, provides them with her own lorgnon in the form of opinion, and pads them with conversational treatises on the subject in hand, like a Cook's guide to a party of tourists.

"'She has more refinement than that,' I can hear you say.

"Refinement, yes. Flowers do not grow with their roots uppermost, but we know they have roots all the same. Her social smile is a very guileless plant, but I detect how far its ramifications extend.

"Her second shelf is scarcely better, it isfor the mothers, mild brooding creatures whose brains perform kaleidoscopic revolutions with the samemateria—dinnermenus, infant food, servants' industries, and wardrobe renovations. 'The idea,' she would say, 'of a woman earning her share of the family income, contributing three hundred or so to the housekeeping instead of saving! It is unconventional, and, consequently, bad form.'

"And the last shelf is for the matrons, dowagers, chaperones—middlewomen of the matrimonial market like her dear misguided self—social seals of respectability stamped with the impress of a Buckingham Palace curtsy; godmothers for the distribution of hall-marked silver and hall-marked morality, dragons——. But I forget your friend, the poet. Of course he thought I was 'trotted out;' of course I hated him for thinking it. I pretended never to have heard of him or read his works. Literature was practically barred, for I confessed I loathed poets. He agreed, quoted Coventry Patmore, who says a poet is one degree removed from a saint—or Balaam's ass. Well, men saints are chilly, and donkeys are troublesome, and kick. Itold him so. Yet I abhor compromises! I can't say what I do care for; certainly not being thrown at men's heads like stale eggs at election time!

"And what do you think we talked of?

"Not the modern girl, you may be sure. Mr Lorraine is romantic, and thinks that intelligent women are bound to be ill-shod, splay-waisted, and brusque. I had half a mind to undeceive him, but he might have imagined I was accentuating my points. We talked of all sorts of things—neutral things. I believe we should have liked each other had I been some nice young married woman with a red star for 'Sold' dabbed on my frame. We always admire pictures that are so ticketed, don't we?—from sheer perversity, I suppose.

"I ate a huge tea. Byron hated women with healthy appetites; I daresay Mr Lorraine does the same. He watched the muffins and the cakes disappear with an almost zoological interest. I was on the verge of inquiring if he ever visited the lions at feeding time—but a song interposed.

"During this I intuitively felt his eye exploring, 'totting me up,' so to speak.

"Vaudin, the tenor, was singing exquisitely. The words were from Mr Lorraine's last book—they were beautiful, and I knew every line, but affected ignorance.

"'What is that tune?' I questioned with vulgar simplicity.

"'The one the old cow died of,' he answered.

"'But the words aren't bad?'

"'Think so?' he drawled, putting up his eyeglass and surveying the singer, as though the voice came from a marionette.

"I proceeded with some chocolate cakes, too nervous for the moment to meet his eye. He did not observe it, however, but resumed his interest in the departure of the edibles. It seemed absorbing! I wonder if he will write a poem ongourmandes!What fun to illustrate it and surprise him! He does not know that I illustrate—what a horrible discovery! To find in this piece of plastic putty a nineteenth century working woman!

"If he had not been a poet and apartihe might have been very charming! As Lady Sargent's dear friend, of course he shares her opinions about the shelves, and my mind wasbent on dispelling that old-worldism, on stamping, 'Not for sale' into my speech somehow. But there was little opportunity, I saw he had mentally pronounced me such a silly little girl.

"'Did I play tennis?'—'Loved it.'

(Truthfully, it has no attractions for me. It was a recreation once, now it is a profession, and one cannot adopt two professions, but I didn't tell him that.)

"'Did I dance?'—'No.'

(I was forced into this admission. Balls I forswear—the shelf is bad enough, but to literally earn a husband by the "sweat of one's face" is humiliating.)

"'No, I never danced,' was my answer. 'I had no superfluous energy to work off.'

"Then we skimmed more trivialities.

"'Had he seen the new roller shaving apparatus?'

"'Did I approve Ladies' Tea Associations?'

"'Did he prefer German to French food, and was he a connoisseur of birds'-nest soup or frizzled frogs?'

"'Scarcely, but in his youth he had tackled periwinkles. That was valiant?'

"'Not at all. I was his match. I had eaten forty-two at a sitting!'

"'All self-picked with a pin?' he queried.

"'No,' I confessed, triumphantly, 'with a surer weapon still.'

"'I believe a pin is the orthodox weapon,' he advanced.

"'Take my advice next time and try a darning-needle.'

"Here Lady Sargent overheard us. You should have seen her face of disgust! Poor dear, how promptly her castle of Eros was blown to smithereens!"

Two days later we were talking of the divine afflatus, and the relation of great work to character, when Lorraine demanded my opinion as to the analogy between thought and conversation.

"Speech was given us to hide our thoughts," I said, quoting Tallyrand without in the least agreeing with him.

"I fancied you would say that," he replied, and opened his note-book to refer to somejottings which had evidently been recently made, and which supplied, strangely enough, another impromptu and bizarre patch to the unconventional whole so recklessly commenced by my sister Sarah.

I append the jottings shown me by their writer as a problem for unravelment. They began:—

"Charming because she is perplexing, or perplexing because she is charming? It is impossible to say. At anyrate, the external pencillings are pretty. Her manner at times betrays pre-disposition to enmity, for the flippant pose is merely a disguise. Is it enmity, or is it reserve? One must take into account the larger reticence of larger natures in serious matters. A woman who can be good reading to the clown must fail to attract the scholar. Yet me she keeps on the bare threshold of comprehension. Is it because there is a barn at the back, or a palace? Most people open up their drawing-rooms at once, and parade their bric-a-brac. Is she given to this want of hospitality in speech, this loitering in the open air, or am I alone treated as a burglar—an intruder,who longs to drag the arras from her sanctum door?"

The next page rambled on in this fashion:—

"There is an initial stage of some characters which is purely parabolic, though every phase of the stage has its analogy in the actual. The difficulty is the tracing of corroborations. With so much promise one looks for some fulfilment, but she contrives to make out of the very postponement of promise a larger reiteration of it. She permits no shadow of negation that might disappoint, no growth of hope that might encourage. Her talk is so well conventionalised to suit the tonic and dominant of social exigence that one must avoid the vulgarian error of striving after a literal transcription of it."

A day later had been scrawled, with a dash of irritation in the caligraphy, a third note:—

"Of dispositions like hers that are worthy analysis, it is expedient to restrain the lesser deduction in order to gain the full breadth of the greater; one must look through the eyelashes at the substantial flesh and blood perfections to achieve the infinite spiritual possibilities deduced by the instinctivecalculus.... Spiritual possibilities! Am I mad to seek for them in a woman-creature with the appetite of a schoolboy and an avowedpenchantfor periwinkles?"

"That last clause," Lorraine said as I came to it, "is merely an ebullition of annoyance. I mean to proceed with my analysis more cool-headedly. The subject is interesting."

"Yes, proceed with it; but I won't warrant the coolness."

"What do you bet?" smiled he thoughtfully.

"My dear fellow, I don't bet on certainties."

Just then the advent of visitors interrupted the discussion, and a whole fortnight passed without my seeing either the poet or my sister.

I had begun to relegate the patchwork romance to the store-cupboard of memory, when into my room rushed Sarah with almost juvenile impetuosity.

"Look at this! Did you ever hear anything so crazed?" She threw a scrap of paper on the table. It was addressed to Clair, and I read it aloud:—

Dear Lady,—You loathe poets. I therefore desire to adopt another calling. Cab-driving might suit me, butI fear I am lacking in the necessary command of language to ensure success. I could sweep a crossing with neatness and precision, and can pick periwinkles with unrivalled velocity. To this end I have been practising daily with a darning-needle and a stop-watch. Have you any objection to entering the lists against me, the winner of course claiming whatever guerdon he or she may desire?

The note was in Lorraine's handwriting, and affixed to it was a copy of Clair's answer:—

Dear Mr Lorraine,—Your poetic gifts will, I fear, militate against advance as a crossing sweeper. The occupation admits of no impressionism, and requires uniform scrupulosity. With regard to the tournament, I accept your challenge, provided, of course, there is a competent umpire.

"What do you think of that?" questioned my sister with concern.

"I think, my good Sarah, it is the oddest piece of work you ever set your hand to, and that you have let us both in for substantial damages in the form of wedding presents."

"'The wrong was mine!' he cried. 'I left my dove'(He flung him down upon the clay),'And now I find her flown—ah, well away!'"

After long sauntering in the Antipodes, I was naturally anxious to hear of him—of his inner life particularly—for his fame as a worldling had skirted the globe. The north wind had trumpeted of it; the south had whispered poetically, if insidiously; the east had contradicted the poetry and accentuated the venom, and western zephyrs had harmonised the whole with a dulcet cadence of admiration and pity. In his profession, however, public opinion was unanimous in proclaiming him pre-eminent. The signature of Wallace Wray—"Woll" we called him—at the corner of a canvas lured the artist mind to praise and thanksgiving; it did more, it loosed some sluggish thousands from speculative coffers—coffers that, prompt enough to gape at safe investment, could stand in the face of the divine afflatus, hermeticallysealed. He had reached the peak on Parnassus where criticism drops crippled and diagnosis wrings its hands; his dexterity of brush had become a species of sleight-of-hand, backgrounded by the mysterious tissue of philosophy, science, and emotion, which, commonly called genius, defies ken or comparison.

He had been a singular youth, the solitary output of one of Nature's quaintest moulds, and from what I learnt, the singularity had become pronounced rather than mellowed by the glaze of time. Yet, as I remembered him—it was five years since we had met—he was an excellent fellow, a mass of incongruity, courageous, sensitive—morbidly so—modest, with a humility deduced from keen self-knowledge, a generous companion and a witty, dispensing the fine flavour of his humour through a countenance as nearly classical as individuality of expression would permit.

This countenance now showed its presentment on the Academy walls. It was this portrait, done by his own hand, which roused my admiration and awoke a greed for more of him. Around me, the wagging of gossip tongues fanned the air, and scraps, hints,fragments of scandal were wafted to my ears as I stood amazed to salute his art in the superb masterpiece of portraiture.

From the confused babble I was straining to sift a grain of truth. It seemed that Wallace Wray had been outraging the feelings of his admirers, had dealt them a slap in the face as cleanly, or rather as dirtily, as a realistic brush could deal it. In the nick of time, Spry, a brother of the craft and the very sieve I needed, jostled at my elbow.

"Splendid likeness—the best he has ever done, eh? He calls it 'The Body of Me.' Ha! ha! The Corporation of H—— commissioned, it, and luckily he got it finished before he took leave of his senses."

"Senses!" I echoed, stupidly. "What is wrong? What has he been saying, doing?"

"More antics! Haven't you seen 'The Soul of Me,' there, in the next room?"

And Spry, scarcely waiting for dissent, led off, inviting me, by backward twists of the head, to follow his pioneering.

The crowd was too great for conversation, but it was easy to know from the congested state of the room in a particular spot whereWray's work must be hung. When patience was nearly exhausted we reached it. Comments and criticisms were freely bandied aloud.

"Decidedly morbid," spake a sightseer in disgust.

"Hideous! I wouldn't own such a picture for worlds," confided one woman to another.

"It is astounding," an art critic remarked to his companion, whose face I knew. "What power, what genius, yet——"

"Genius is a loganstone," said the other, shaking his head. "It rocks and rocks, but a stalk of asphodel may shift it from its centre."

"For 'asphodel' translate 'woman,'" the critic replied, "and you solve the riddle."

At this moment a gap opened; it was sufficiently wide to reveal the subject without the frame of the picture.

On a slab of wood in semi-darkness lay a drowned woman. The rays from a lamp, held aloft by a bargee or coal-heaver, flickered down on the green-grey features that had already lost the expression which accompanies the first beatitude of death. Some outcast, as the worn finery proved; young in years, we knew by themodelling of her throat; aged in worldliness, by the hard set of her features, the sparse strands of faded hair that might once have glittered. The folds of the frayed gown hung lank, heavy with dark drops of liquid mud which oozed and fell slowly to the ground, already a morass of wharf drippings that reflected pallidly the meagre gleams of the uplifted lamp. The magnificent anatomy of a beautiful arm, a shapely bosom—bared, it seemed, in an effort to reanimate—showed that this was no plebeian waif driven by stress of poverty over the water's edge. On the elbow was grim evidence of Wray's realistic mood—a bruise, wide and purple, and higher up, the dull indenture of a water-rat's tooth.

"Well," said Spry, watching my mute amazement, "he has left no part of his gruesome task undone; he has gloated in it—look!—even to the snipping of the linen."

A definite jag on the front of the shift—the place which is usually inscribed with the name of the owner—was carefully insisted on. It was the highest light in the picture, and seemed to emphasise a piteous degradation and still more piteous consciousness thereof.

"Wray turned moralist?" a bystander sneered.

"We may find sermons in stones, but we don't want 'em on canvas," bounced another, a "port-wine-flavoured" personage, who ogled for applause with the confidence of the self-crowned wag.

I eyed him with swelling spleen, and shot a dart at Spry which was intended to ricochet.

"Wasn't it Flaubert who said that, in the hands of an artist, a disembowelled ox would make as fine a subject as any other?"

"I don't know," returned Spry, "but, anyway, about this work there are ugly tales afloat. It is too true—unpleasantly, unnecessarily true."

It indeed appeared to be inhumanly horrible—a vulture swoop of the brush—and, much as I appreciated Wray as a friend and worshipped him as a disciple, I was forced to recognise a want of reserve, some lack of sentiment in the handling—say, rather, over-handling—of so repellant a subject. His aim seemed to lie in choking sentiment—suffocating it in loathliness and disgust. There was a violence of passion that suggested the manner ofPrudhon—suggested it, but, giant-like, overshadowed it with the brawny vigour of modern actuality.

I turned from the picture to the crowd, blinked dazedly to find myself again facing daylight and colour, and stretched myself awake as far as environing shoulders would allow. Looking away from this squalid scene, I became suddenly aware of an unusual amount of paint and gilding on the walls—an art tawdriness that had not before obtruded itself. My taste for the reproduction of veined marble and glossy parquet, for pretty pussies and portraits of gentlefolk was exhausted. I made for the turnstiles, and nodded to Spry to get quit of him.

"I'm off," I said, curtly, "to look up Wray and offer my congratulations."

Green Park, bedecked in spring raiment, seemed to me at that moment a welcome oasis of verdure in the midst of the swirl of Piccadilly; it offered no impediment to the bubbling flood of conjecture that Wray's strangechef d'œuvrehad let loose.

So far as I knew him—and our friendship, though spasmodic by reason of my wanderings,had existed since our teens—he was the last man to sneak voluntarily into the shadowy niches of life; his nature clung to radiance and his sentiment revolted at the opacity of pessimism. Why, then, this sudden hectic of the sensational? Why, indeed, unless the genius, the loganstone, as suggested by the fellow in the exhibition, had rocked till it tilted?

In the midst of my mental tussle, while twisting the pros and cons in favour of lunacy, and walking with bent head and irresponsible stride, I fell foul of an obstacle. It was Lawrence Vane, the poet, who, being well known to me, chose this mode of salute.

"Yourmoutonsare causing you trouble," he laughed. "Debts?—love affairs?"

"I have neither," I replied, without a vestige of humour.

He was a breezy fellow, good tempered and sound, but at the moment he was out of place. Despite my abruptness he wheeled round and kept pace with me.

"You were totting up your virtues then?" he pursued.

"I can do that on my fingers. It wasWray's vagaries that puzzled me. I am on my way to him."

His cheery mood vanished.

"Don't go near him," he burst out. "He is a beast; I loathe him."

"He is my friend." (This with an accent on the last word.)

"I expected that. They were my friends once, but I never go there now."

"They?" I inquired. I had forgotten the report of Wray's marriage, five years before. It had taken place in Rome on the eve of my departure from England.

"He and his wife. You met her? No? She was the sweetest girl that ever stept."

"Was?" I exclaimed. "Is she dead?"

"Dead to us, to society, to happiness. She left her husband within the year."

"Poor fellow!"

It was well to have met Lawrence before going to Wray's studio—awkward situations might have ensued. I delved for more of the domestic history.

"She was the prey of mischief-makers—there were so many who envied her. People whispered cruelly of her mysterious elfishbeauty, and women coveted her golden hair; for nothing women resent so much as Nature's own coronation of sovereignty. She was only eighteen, and believed in him—worse luck for her. Afterwards she became jealous and tried the spur. It makes some beasts go and some stand stock still. He gibbed. Rash people—men—quoted Byron, told her that constancy was woman's greatest vice; others—women—bragged of the equality of man and woman, hinted at levelling down when you can't level up."

"He had cared for her?"

"It was a love match. But you can't plant figs in the midst of thistles. He was easygoing, hated a smart, so there was no uprooting, and the fig tree perished!"

There were tears in Lawrence's eyes, but he began whistling a music hall air in affectation of nonchalance.

"Well," I said, extending a hand as we neared Buckingham Gate, "it is miserably sad, but thanks for instructing me. I shall be saved unlucky allusions."

"You mean to see him?" he asked, dejectedly.

"Certainly."

With a wry sneer of dissatisfaction he bade me good-bye, and I continued my way to the studio.

Lawrence Vane's view struck me as narrow and one-sided. He ignored the fact that Wray was one of the most courted men in London, that in England and America his genius drew to him followers, patrons, friends of all ranks, and that, as a natural consequence, there were warm corners in women's hearts for this spoilt child of fortune. With the world beckoning, the fair sex flinging petals from the rose gardens of love and admiration, he had needed more than human dexterity to pick his way through the scented labyrinths that were continually twining around his feet.

I found him in, and he greeted me with his rare smile. In an instant I observed that he was no longer the same Wray, whose presentiment he himself had painted for the Corporation of H——, no longer the harum-scarum painter I had known five years ago; it seemed as though he had thrown all the buoyancy of colour and tissue—the veritable body of him—on the canvas, and had leftmerely a shadow of the original to walk the earth.

The studio, a temporary one, was on the ground floor. It looked out on the bustle and swarm of the Buckingham Palace Road, where the roar of traffic was accompanied by wafts of martial music from the adjacent parade ground. It made a bizarre accompaniment to our reunion.

I strained his hand, shook it more than once as an assurance. I wished to convey to him that I was not ignorant, nor curious—in fact, that I believed in him. My allegiance was unshaken by Lawrence Vane's history. I gave him the faith of friendship, which is a closer grained quality than the faith of love.

We stood among his pictures and gossiped of art, praising H's brush-work, wondering at R's anatomy, arguing L's historical accuracy, and talking of everything warily—on the brink, as it were, of a plunge, like timid girls at a river, dipping now a finger, a foot, an arm, in the chilly depths, and wavering. When at last we were seated he took a header.

"You've seen my portrait?"

"At the Academy? Just come from it."

"You think I've flattered myself?" he said, with his head on one side, his eyes asking more than the question.

"It would not have done you justice three years ago," I evaded.

"Good! I wished the husk to be a thing of beauty. You think it a work that will live?"

"Assuredly, or the Corporation of H—— would not have unbuttoned to it. It keeps its heart well within the limits of its waistcoat."

"And the other—the kernel?"

I looked at him and arched an interrogative eyebrow.

"The other picture? 'The Soul of Me?'"

"Of course I've seen it. It's magnificent work, Woll, but I don't like it."

"Crude realism, eh?" he said, leaning sideways and bending a palette knife backwards and forwards on the back of his chair.

"More," I said—"exaggeration."

He paled. I thought it was in offence at my critical presumption.

"There was none," he averred. "You shall see the original sketch," and he paced to an easel that stood, covered with a cloth, in a distant corner. He unveiled it.

"Ugh!" My cry was inevitable. I resisted the impulse to shroud my eyes, but my teeth clenched on words.

It was the same picture with a terrible difference. Vivid, almost glaring, in the black gloom and silence, the woman's form represented a combination of all the debasement and degradation of the world. Evil spirits seemed to mock and writhe and gibber in the sludge of the foreground; the iridescent atmosphere hung with noisome miasmic dews, even the face of the bargee glowed like a fiend in the glare of his lamp, held viciously aloft to reveal in its completeness the whole squalid history of spiritual failure.

"Who was she?" I whispered at last—it was a sight to shackle the tongue—and his answer hissed back like the sound of searing iron on sweating flesh:—

"It was mywife."

Heaven forgive me, I shrank from him. The man who could thus portray accurately, unmercifully, this tale of hideous defilement—the victim his wife, however sinning—must be himself either morally debased or partially insane.

He saw the gesture, and moved away to the foot of the model throne and waited.

I could think of nothing but the ghastly achievement, could stand only with bulged eyes staring at it, a dry, dusty flavour parching my tongue. At last I broke from the horrible fascination—a fascination that almost prompted me to snatch his knife and rip the canvas from end to end.

I flung down the cloth.

"Sit there," he almost commanded, and pointed to an arm-chair at some distance from him.

"You may shun me. It is what I wanted—deserved. To that end I confessed it, 'The Soul of Me.'"

Then on a sudden his meaning dawned.

"The body," he went on, "was painted before I learnt what colour the soul was. I will tell you."

"No, no!" I remonstrated, perceiving the tension of his set jaws. "It will pain you, and do no good."

"Pain?" he said. "There is no pain that eats into the heart like silence. The knowledge of guilt hidden corrodes like an acid.It must have been that which taught the Catholic Church the value of confession."

"Possibly," I said, moving from my distant chair to his side, and grasping his hand. "But remember I am not a priest; I am only, and always, a friend."

"I know, I know," he said, hurriedly, staring out across the room at the humming, busy road. "My confession is not to you. All that humanity can do the priests have done. You stare? Yes, I've turned myself inside out for them; but all their altar flowers cannot scent a foul soul, nor can their sanctuary lights illumine its crooked corners. I'm no historian, but I've heard of cases where private penance, remorse, and religious absolution have totally failed to wipe clean the hearts of intellectual men—they of the world, sinners, needing absolution of the world. Such men, who live in the open, and trumpet their triumphs there, need, too, to howl their confessions from the housetop, carve their contrition, like the wisdom of Asoka, on the immemorial rocks as an outcry to the generations."

He started up, and began to stride aboutthe room. His face was full of passionate grief, and his wandering eyes passed beyond me as though watching a sunset.

I thought of the loganstone, and of the frail woman, the stalk of asphodel, who had unhinged it. The great painter, sensitive ever to colour and beauty and flattery and happiness, to pin-pricks and to sneers, had dropped in pieces before a real strain—sin for which he held himself responsible, remorse that found no outlet wide enough for his great transcendent heart.

Presently he stood still before his picture, threw back the curtain, and surveyed it with folded arms.

"She was pure," he muttered, half to himself; "sweet, sweet as new milk from warm udders in cowslip time, and I—I brought her to my cobwebbed life without so much as a preliminary sweep of the broom. She thought me like herself, and I dared not undeceive her; but others—curse them!—they taught her. She was pure as milk, I said—ay, for milk absorbs poison quicker than things less pure. She breathed the taint from the loathly atmosphere of my world—ofthe world that had been mine.... But I loved her ... would have won her back—cringed to her. She spurned me, spited me through herself, evaded me, till"—a shuddering horror stifled his voice—"till, by chance, I came onthat."

I followed him to the easel, and placed an affectionate arm on his shoulder.

"Well, old man, you must clear out of this. Come along with me back to the Bush, and drop this nightmare."

"Drop it?" he flouted; "why, the world reeks of it!"

"Not now. You say that even the priests absolve you."

"Cheap contrition! cheap absolution! how one cuddles them at first—at first! But in time we feel our canker—it grows under the clean Church wrappings—in time we learn that where our sanctuary is, there, alone, can our penance be. Hence this picture. It accompanies the portrait, a gift to the nation. You can't think what a going down on the marrow bones it was—down on the stones for every rascal to gaze and prod at, an attitude for eternity."

"You'll come to Australia?" I repeated, adhering obstinately to my matter-of-fact bent.

"As you please. I feel clean enough for your company now, for I have committed suicide—not vulgarly, by murdering myself, but suicide spiritually. I have given up the ghost by working out the pitch through the point of my brush, and the carcass is yours to bury where or how you will."

(The field is divided by a stile and a hedge from some pastures.)

He(bent double in the act of gathering poppies).And what would you vote about?

She(with hand extended to receive them).Oh, anything—everything!

He. And the candidate who paid most compliments would get most votes, eh?

She. It would depend on how he paid them.

He(looking up and laughing).Then it's the quality, and not the quantity, which tells?

She.Nothing would "tell," as you call it, if we did not approve his principles.

He.Not even the offer of a new bonnet?

She.That would be bribery and corruption!

He.But somebonbonnièresat Christmas time?

She.Oh, everyone accepts them.

He.Then the vote would depend on the excellence of the confectioner?

She.Do not chaff on serious subjects.

He.I was never more serious in my life!

She(pouting). Then you are horribly rude and unkind! Don't pick any more poppies; the bunch is too large already.

He.Let me take it for you.

She(with warmth). I don't want you to do anything for me. It is time you learnt that woman can be independent if she choose.

He(with a merry twinkle in his eye). You will permit me to carry your sunshade?

She(simmering). No; I don't want services from people who laugh at one.

He(drawing his moustache carefully over his lips). I am not laughing.

She.Then you ought to be. There is no excuse for a man arguing seriously against woman's emancipation.

He.I thought you wished me to be serious.

She(tossing her head). You know very well what I wish.

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