'You know,' resumed Selwyn thoughtfully, 'a man doesn't go to a dinner-party conscious of what he is going to say. It is the people he meets that produce ideas in him, many of which he had never thought of before.'

She tapped the ground with her foot, and looked smilingly at his serious face. 'It is the reverse with me,' she said. 'I go out to dinner full of ideas, and the people I meet inspire a silence in me of unsuspected depth.'

'May I smoke?' asked Selwyn, calling a halt in the verbal duel.

'Certainly; I'll join you. Don't smoke your own cigarettes--there are some right in front of you.'

He reached for a silver box, offered her a cigarette, and struck a match. As he leaned over her she raised her face to the light, and the blood mounted angrily to his head.

Though a man accustomed to dissect rather than obey his pa.s.sions, he possessed that universal quality of man which demands the weakness of the feminine nature in the woman who interests him. He will satirise that failing; if he be a writer, it will serve as an endless theme for light cynicism. He will deplore that a woman's brains are so submerged by her emotions; but let him meet one reversely const.i.tuted, and he steers his course in another direction with all possible speed.

Selwyn had come to her with a comfortable, after-dinner desire for a _tete-a-tete_. He expected flattering questions about his writings, and would have enjoyed talking about them; instead of which this English girl with the crimson colouring and the maddening eyes had coolly kept him at a distance with her rapier brain. He felt a sudden indignation at her s.e.xlessness, and struck a match for his own cigarette with such energy that it broke in two.

'Miss Durwent,' he said suddenly, lighting another match, 'I want to see you again--soon.' He paused, astonished at his own abruptness, and an awkward smile expanded until it crinkled the very pinnacle of his nose.

'I like you when you look like that,' she said. 'It was just like my brother d.i.c.k when he fell off a horse. By the way, do you ride?'

'Yes,' he said, watching the cigarette-smoke curl towards the fireplace, 'though I prefer an amiable beast to a spirited one.'

'Good!' she said, so quickly that it seemed like the thrust of a sword in tierce. 'You have the same taste in horses as in women. Most men have.'

'Miss Durwent'--his face flushed angrily and his jaw stiffened--'I'll ride any horse you choose in England, and'----

'And break the heart of the most vixenish maiden in London! You are a real American, after all. What is it you say over there? "Shake!"'

She slapped her hand into his, and he held it in a strong grip.

'But you _will_ let me see you again soon?'

'Certainly.' She withdrew her hand from his with a firmness that had neither censure nor coquetry in it, and the heightened colour of her cheeks subsided with the sparkle of her eyes.

'When?' he said.

'To-morrow morning, if you like. I shall have horses here at eleven, and we can ride in the Row, providing you will put up with anything so quiet as our cattle.'

'That is bully of you. I shall be here at eleven.'

'I thought all Americans used slang,' she said.

'You are the first English girl I have met,' he answered with extraordinary venom in his voice, 'who has not said "ripping."'

Twenty minutes later Austin Selwyn, unable to secure a taxi, tramped along Oxford Street towards his hotel. He had just reached the Circus when the malignant wind, hiding in ambush down Regent Street, rushed at him unawares and sent his hat roistering into the doorway of a store.

With a frown, Selwyn stopped and stared at the truant.

'Confound the wretched thing!' he said.

CHAPTER VI.

A MORNING IN NOVEMBER.

I.

Austin Selwyn rose from his bed and looked at Berners Street glistening in a sunlight that must have warmed the heart of Madame Carlotti herself. With a lazy pleasure in the process, he recalled the picture of Elise Durwent sitting in the dim shadows of the firelit room; he felt again the fragrance of her person as he leaned over her with the lighted match. On the canvas of his brain was thrown the rich colouring of the English girl, with the copper-hued luxury of hair and the eyes that seemed to steal some magic from the fire; and he saw again those warring lips, the crimson upper one chiding the pa.s.sionate scarlet of its twin.

Idly, while enjoying the unusual dissipation of a pre-breakfast cigarette, he tried to imagine the course of incident and heredity that had produced her strange personality. That there was a bitterness somewhere in her disposition was obvious; but it certainly could not have come from the mother, who was the soul of contentment. He found himself speculating on the peculiar quality of personality, that strange thing which makes an individual something apart from others of his kind, that gift which singles out a girl of ordinary appearance and leaves one of flawless beauty still wagging her pretty head in the front row of the chorus. From that point he began to speculate on the loneliness of personality, which so often robs its owner of the cheery companionship of commonplace people.

On the whole, he regretted that he was going to see her again so soon.

Her pertness, which had seemed fairly clever the previous night, would probably descend to triteness in the morning; he could even see her endeavouring to keep up the same exchange of short sentences. Bah! It was like a duel with toothpicks. The stolid respectability of Berners Street lent its aid to the conviction that the morning would hold nothing but anti-climax.

And he was poet enough to prefer an unfinished sonnet to one with an inartistic ending.

II.

Austin Selwyn was twenty-six--an age which has something in common with almost every one of the seven celebrated by Shakespeare. Like most men in their twenties, he had the character of a chameleon, and adapted himself to his surroundings with almost uncanny facility. At college he had been an ardent member of a dozen cliques, even falling under the egotism of the men who dabbled in Spiritualism, but a clarity of thought and a strain of Dutch ancestry kept his feet on the earth when the rest of him showed signs of soaring.

Some moderate wit had said of him at college that he was himself only twice a day--when he got up in the morning and when he went to bed at night. This Stevensonian theory was not quite true, for a chameleon does not cease to be a chameleon because it changes its colour.

It was perhaps his susceptibility to the many vintages of existence that had impelled him to write, authors being more or less a natural result of the economic law of intake and output. As is the habit of most young writers, he wrote on various subjects, put enough material for a two-volume novel into a short story, and generally revelled in the prodigality of literary youth. He was prepared to be a social satirist, a chronicler of the Smart Set, a champion of the down-trodden ma.s.ses, or a commercial essayist, according to the first public that showed appreciation of his work.

Although he had lived in Boston, that city which claims so close an affinity to ancient Athens (as a matter of fact, has it not been said that Athens is the Boston of Europe?), he was drawn to the great vortex of New York, that mighty capital of modernism which sucks the best brains of an entire continent. For some time he wrote beneath his own standard and with considerable success. Following the example of several successful New York authors, he plunged into a hectic portrayal of 'high' society, a set of people that makes one wonder as to the exact meaning of the adjective. For a short s.p.a.ce he came under the influence of the studied Bohemianism of 'Greenwich Village,' and wrote deucedly clever things for the applause of the villagers, then sneered at American taste because people in Arkansas did not like his work.

Still retaining his love of Greenwichery, he next succ.u.mbed to the money lure of the motion-picture industry, which offered to buy the picture-rights of his stories, provided he would introduce into them the elements which go to make up successful American films.

With the prospect of a bank president's income before him, he succeeded in writing his share of that form of American literature which has a certain love interest, almost obscured by a nasty s.e.xual diagnosis, an element of comedy relief, and, above all, a pa.s.sionate adherence to the craze of the moment--a work that fades from the mind with the closing of the book, as the memory of the author's name vanishes almost before the last sound of the earth dropped upon his coffin.

He knew that there were sincere _literati_ writing of the abiding things that do not die with the pa.s.sing of a season, but the clamour of commercialism drowned their voices. As though they were stocks upon an exchange, he heard the cries: 'Brown's getting five thousand dollars a month writing serials for Hitch's;' 'Smith sold two novels on synopsis for thirty thousand dollars;' 'Green's signed up with Tagwicks for four years at two thousand dollars a month writing problem novels.' Into the maelstrom of 'Dollars, Dollars, Dollars,' the sensitive brains of all America were drifting, throwing overboard ideals and aspirations in order to keep afloat in the swirling foam.

And then--the Fates stooped and touched his destiny with a star.

A New York publisher (one of that little group which has for its motto, 'Art for Art's sake,' not 'Art, for G.o.d's sake!') noticed him, and spoke of literature as an expression of the soul, a thing not of a season or a decade, but as ageless as a painting.

His ear caught the new song of attainment just as readily as it had received the chorus of 'Dollars.' He wrote a novel of New England life, full of faults, but vibrant with promise; and having gathered together quite a nice sum of money, he went to England, at the advice of the before-mentioned publisher, there and elsewhere in Europe to absorb the less oxygenic atmosphere of older civilisations, which still gives birth to the beginnings of things.

Twice he had visited Paris. The first time, with the instinct of the tourist, he had discovered the vileness of the place--a discovery fairly easy of accomplishment. The second time he had ignored the tourist-stimulated aspect of Paris life, and had allowed his senses to absorb the soul of the Capital of all the Latins, the laboratory of civilisation. And he who has done that is never the same man again.

Germany had ministered to his reason, and Italy to his emotions; but he found his greatest interest in London, which offered to him an endless inspiration of changing moods, of vagrant smells, and the effect of a stupendous drama of humanity.

Under the spell of Europe's ageless artistry and the rich-hued meadows of England's literary past he had grown humble. The song of 'Dollars'

was less clamorous than the echo of the ocean in the heart of a sea-sh.e.l.l. When he wrote, which was seldom, he approached his paper-littered desk as an artist does his canvas. It was the medium by which he might gain a modest niche in the Hall of the Immortals--or, failing that, his soul at least would be enriched by the sincerity of his endeavour.

In that highly artistic frame of mind he suddenly secured the _entree_ into London Society. For some reason, as unaccountable as the reverse, a wave of popularity for Americans was breaking against the oak doors, and he was carried in on the crest. The result was not enn.o.bling. The dormant instinct of satire leaped to life and the idealist became the jester.

But then he was twenty-six and most agreeably susceptible to hap-hazard influence. Being a Bostonian, he acquitted himself with creditable _savoir faire_; and being an American, his appreciation of the ridiculous saved him from the quagmire of sn.o.bbery, though he made many friends and dined regularly with august people, whose family trees were so rich in growth that they lived in perpetual gloom from the foliage.