She was relieved when Peter decided to spend the summer on the coast; she was a coast woman herself, and she longed for the smell of the sea. And then, to add to her joy, had come this last, astonishing news: "dat gal" was going to divorce Mist' Peter! That incomprehensible marriage would be done away with, that grim, red-headed dragoness would go out of their lives! Emma's speretuals took a more hopeful trend; and Peter whistled while he worked.
He had written Vandervelde that he couldn't forego his summer's work, but would probably be in New York that autumn. In the meantime, let Vandervelde look after his interests as usual and see to it that Mrs. Champneys was more adequately and liberally provided for. He forgot to inquire as to the real value of his possessions. He did say to himself soberly:
"Jingo! This thing sounds like money--as if I were a mighty rich man! I'll have to do something about this!"
But he wasn't overly upset, or even very greatly interested. His real concern had never been money; it had been, like Rousseau's and Millet's, to make the manifestation of life his first thought, to make a man really breathe, a tree really vegitate.
And so he went to the coast, as happy as a school-boy on a holiday. The sea fascinated him, and the faces of the men who go down to the sea in ships. It was going to be the happiest and most fruitful summer he had known for years. He bade the Hemingways a gay farewell. Mrs. Hemingway, he noted, looked at him speculatively. Her matrimonial plans for him had revived.
He worked gloriously. He ate like a school-boy, and slept like one, dreamlessly. What was happening in the outside world didn't interest him; what he had to do was to catch a little of the immortal and yet shifting loveliness of the world and imprison it on a piece of canvas. He didn't get any of the newspapers. When he smoked at night with his friend the curé, a gentle, philosophic old priest who had known a generation of painter-folk and loved this painter with a fatherly affection, he heard passing bits of world gossip. The priest took several papers, and liked to talk over with his artist friend what he had read. It was the priest, pale and perturbed, who told him that war was upon the world. Peter didn't believe it. In his heart he thought that the fear of war with her great neighbor had become a monomania with the French.