“Help me! It has helped me to understand what happiness is. I didn’t know that before.”
“Well, George, you mustn’t kill my pride; keep me proud of you, proud of having helped you, proud of myself. There, we’ll talk no more about it now, and to-morrow, or the next day, you shall start another picture, only I will not be your model.”
“No! We’re not going to argue the first day we are together. Look, the rain’s over and the sun’s trying to come out. I’ll run up and put on my country boots and hat, and we’ll go for a walk over the downs.”
FOR the first time West hesitated in his dealing with a woman. Partly it was that Marian puzzled as well as attracted him, partly it was that the precipitancy of his marriage with Agatha and its failure gave him pause before he took the step of trying to win Marian away from Maddison. He admired her, but he was by no means sure that the admiration was mutual; indeed part of her attraction for him was that she had not in any way, so far as he could see, endeavored to bring him to her side. Hitherto the women whom he had met had made little effort to conceal the fact that his money rendered him a welcome suitor.
It was his custom every morning to walk in Hyde Park before going to business; it was usually the only hour in the day which was not interrupted and in which, therefore, he could think clearly. This mental constitutional was broken up one day by meeting Alice Lane. They came suddenly face to face at a sharp turning close by the Serpentine.
“You’re most unfashionably early!” he said, falling into step with her.
“I’m unfashionable in everything, I think. I didn’t know you were in town.”
“Is that a kind of way of reminding me that I ought to have called? I’ve been awfully busy.”
“How’s Agatha? Is she still at Brighton?”
“Yes. She’s much better and beginning to enjoy herself. What have you been doing?”
“I can’t believe that of you. You’d go crazy if you hadn’t something to do.”
“Why, I stopped weeks with you and didn’t do a single thing the whole time.”
“That’s true,” he admitted, laughing; “but you always manage to give the impression of being busy. Like one of my men, whom I had to fire out the other day—he was always awfully busy and didn’t get any work done.”