Esmé Trenor was both clever and alert. He had not even missed that slight and momentary glimmer of good-humoured malice in the pleasant glance of Barres. But, like his more intelligent prototype, Whistler, it was impossible to know whether or not discovery ever made any particular difference to him. He tucked a lilac-bordered handkerchief a little deeper 92 into his cuff, glanced at his jewelled wrist-watch, shook the long ash from his cigarette.
“To be positive in anything,” he drawled, “is an effort; effort entails exertion; exertion is merely a degree of violence; violence engenders toxins; toxins dull the intellect. Quod erat, dear friend. You see?”
“Oh, yes, I see,” nodded Barres, always frankly amused at Trenor and his ways.
“Well, then, if you see – ” Trenor waved a long, bony, over-manicured hand, expelled a ring or two of smoke, meditatively; then, in his characteristically languid voice: “To be positive closes the door to further observation and pulls down the window shades. Nothing remains except to go to bed. Is there anything more uninteresting than to go to bed? Is there anything more depressing than to know all about something?”
“You do converse like an ass sometimes,” remarked Barres.
“Yes – sometimes. Not now, Barres. I don’t desire to know all about anybody or anything. Fancy my knowing all about art, for example!”
“Yes, fancy!” repeated Barres, laughing.
“Or about anything specific – a woman, for example!” He shrugged wearily.
“If you meet a woman and like her, don’t you want to know all there is to know about her?” inquired Barres.
“I should say not!” returned the other with languid contempt. “I don’t wish to know anything at all about her.”
“Well, we differ about that, old top.”
“Religiously. A woman can be only an incidental amusement in one’s career. You don’t go to a musical 93 comedy twice, do you? And any woman will reveal herself sufficiently in one evening.”
“Nice, kindly domestic instincts you have, Trenor.”
“I’m merely fastidious,” returned the other, dropping his cigarette out of the open window. He rose, yawned, took his hat, stick and gloves.
“Bye,” he said languidly. “I’m painting Elsena Helmund this morning.”
Barres said, with good-humoured envy:
“I’ve neither commission nor sitter. If I had, you bet I’d not stand there yawning at my luck.”
“It is you who have the luck, not I,” drawled Trenor. “I give a portion of my spiritual and material self with every brush stroke, while you remain at liberty to flourish and grow fat in idleness. I perish as I create; my life exhausts itself to feed my art. What you call my good luck is my martyrdom. You see, dear friend, how fortunate you are?”
“I see,” grinned Barres. “But will your spiritual nature stand such a cruel drain? Aren’t you afraid your morality may totter?”
“Morality,” mused Esmé, going; “that is one of those early Gothic terms now obsolete, I believe – ”
He sauntered out with his hat and gloves and stick, still murmuring:
“Morality? Gothic – very Gothic – ”
Barres, still amused, sorted his wet brushes, dried them carefully one by one on a handful of cotton waste, and laid them in a neat row across the soapstone top of his palette-table.
“Hang it!” he muttered cheerfully. “I could paint like a streak this morning if I had the chance – ”
He threw himself back in his chair and sat there smoking for a while, his narrowing eyes fixed on a great window which opened above the court. Soft spring 94 breezes stirred the curtains; sparrows were noisy out there; a strip of cobalt sky smiled at him over the opposite chimneys; an April cloud floated across it.
He rose, walked over to the window and glanced down into the court. Several more hyacinths were now in blossom. The Prophet dozed majestically, curled up on an Italian garden seat. Beside him sprawled the snow white Houri, stretched out full length in the sun, her wonderful blue eyes following the irrational gambols of the tortoise-shell cat, Strindberg, who had gone loco, as usual, and was tearing up and down trees, prancing sideways with flattened ears and crooked tail, in terror at things invisible, or digging furiously toward China amid the hyacinths.
Dulcie Soane came out into the court presently and expostulated with Strindberg, who suffered herself to be removed from the hyacinth bed, only to make a hysterical charge on her mistress’s ankles.
“Stop it, you crazy thing!” insisted Dulcie, administering a gentle slap which sent the cat bucketing and corvetting across the lawn, where the eccentric course of a dead leaf, blown by the April wind, instantly occupied its entire intellectual vacuum.
Barres, leaning on the window-sill, said, without raising his voice:
“Hello, Dulcie! How are you, after our party?”
The child looked up, smiled shyly her response through the pale glory of the April sunshine.
“What are you doing to-day?” he inquired, with casual but friendly interest.
“Nothing.”
“Isn’t there any school?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“That’s so. Well, if you’re doing nothing you’re 95 just as busy as I am,” he remarked, smiling down at her where she stood below his window.
“Why don’t you paint pictures?” ventured the girl diffidently.
“Because I haven’t any orders. Isn’t that sad?”
“Yes… But you could paint a picture just to please yourself, couldn’t you?”
“I haven’t anybody to paint from,” he explained with amiable indifference, lazily watching the effect of alternate shadow and sunlight on her upturned face.
“Couldn’t you find – somebody?” Her heart had suddenly begun to beat very fast.
Barres laughed:
“Would you like to have your portrait painted?”
She could scarcely find voice to reply:
“Will you – let me?”
The slim young figure down there in the April sunshine had now arrested his professional attention. With detached interest he inspected her for a few moments; then:
“You’d make an interesting study, Dulcie. What do you say?”
“Do – do you mean that you want me?”
“Why – yes! Would you like to pose for me? It’s pin-money, anyway. Would you like to try it?”
“Y-yes.”
“Are you quite sure? It’s hard work.”
“Quite
