“I suppose we’d better begin sorting out our things to-morrow,” said Michael.
Stella came back from Vienna for a month in the summer. Indeed she was already arrived, when Michael reached Cheyne Walk. He was rather anxious to insist directly to her that her disinclination to marry Prescott had nothing to do with his death. Michael did not feel it would be good for Stella at nineteen to believe to that extent in her power. One or two of her letters had betrayed an amount of self-interest that Michael considered unhealthy. With this idea in view, he was surprised when she made no allusion to the subject, and resented a little that he must be the one to lead up to it.
“Oh, don’t let’s talk of what happened nearly a year ago,” protested Stella.
“You were very much excited by it at the time,” Michael pointed out.
“Ah, but lots of things have happened since then.”
He disapproved of the suggestion that the suicide of a lifelong friend was a drop in the ocean of incident that swayed round Stella.
“Oh, loves and deaths and jealousies and ambitions,” said she lightly. “Things do happen in Vienna. It’s much more eventful than Paris. I don’t know what made me come back to London. I’m missing so much fun.”
This implication that he and his mother were dull company for her was really rather irritating.
“You’d better go and look up some of your Bohemian friends,” he advised severely. “They’re probably all hanging about Chelsea still. It’s not likely that any of them is farther on with his art than he was two years ago. Who was that bounder you were so fond of, and that girl who painted? Clarissa Vine, wasn’t she called? What about her?”
“Poor old George,” said Stella. “I really must try and get hold of him. I haven’t seen Clarie for some time. She made a fool of herself over some man.”
The result of Michael’s sarcastic challenge was actually a tea-party in the big studio at 173 Cheyne Walk, which Stella herself described as being like turning out a lumber-room of untidy emotions.
“They’re as queer as old-fashioned clothes,” she said. “But rather touching, don’t you think, Michael? Though after all,” she added pensively, “I haven’t gone marching at a very great pace along that triumphant career of mine. I don’t know that I’ve much reason to laugh at them. Really in one way poor Clarie is in a better position than me. At least she can afford to keep the man she’s living with. As for George Ayliffe, since he gave up trying to paint the girls he was in love with, he has become ‘one of our most promising realists.’”