Glow 15 Unofficial Recipe Book 30 More

Tantalizing Healthy Energizing Recipes Karah

Westlake download

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow-15-unofficial-recipe-
book-30-more-tantalizing-healthy-energizing-recipes-karah-
westlake-48772146

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookbell.com

Here are some recommended products that we believe you will be
interested in. You can click the link to download.

Unplugged Ninja A Childrens Book About Screen Time Ninja Life Hacks 15
Mary Nhin Grow Grit Press

https://ebookbell.com/product/unplugged-ninja-a-childrens-book-about-
screen-time-ninja-life-hacks-15-mary-nhin-grow-grit-press-42944314

Glow15 Whittel Naomi

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow15-whittel-naomi-10479446

Glow15 Naomi Whittel

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow15-naomi-whittel-22160514

Glow Kids 1st Edition Nicholas Kardaras

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow-kids-1st-edition-nicholas-
kardaras-50901060
Glow In The Fcking Dark Simple Practices To Heal Your Soul From
Someone Who Learned The Hard Way Tara Schuster

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow-in-the-fcking-dark-simple-
practices-to-heal-your-soul-from-someone-who-learned-the-hard-way-
tara-schuster-52099486

Glow How You Can Radiate Energy Innovation And Success Lynda Gratton

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow-how-you-can-radiate-energy-
innovation-and-success-lynda-gratton-2141594

Glow Beth Kery

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow-beth-kery-22199914

Glow Discharge Optical Emission Spectroscopy A Practical Guide Richard

Payling

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow-discharge-optical-emission-
spectroscopy-a-practical-guide-richard-payling-4335816

Glow Brewed Book 3 Molly Mcadams

https://ebookbell.com/product/glow-brewed-book-3-molly-
mcadams-44818106
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 "The Spirit of the Age now, as so often in history, will prove a false
prophet, a charlatan and juggler, making large promises which he will fail
to redeem," Adrian declared. "See, do not art, nature, the cumulative result
of human experience, combine to discredit his methods and condemn his
objects?"

"Convince Gabrielle St. Leger of that, and my thanks and applause will
not be wanting."

"I will convince her," Adrian cried, with growing exaltation. "I will
convince her. I devote my life to that purpose, to that end."

And thereupon a certain solemnity seemed to descend upon and diffuse

itself through the quiet, lofty room, affecting both speaker and listener,
causing them to sit silent, as though in hushed suspense, awaiting the
sensible ratification of some serious engagement entered into, some binding
oath taken. In the stillness faint, fugitive echoes reached them of the
palpitating life and movement of the city outside. The effect was arresting.
To Adrian it seemed as though he stood on the extreme edge, the crumbling,
treacherous verge, of some momentous episode in which he was
foredoomed to play a part, but a part alien to his desires and defiant of his
control. While—and this touched him with intimate, though half-ashamed,
shrinking and repudiation—not Gabrielle St. Leger, but Joanna
Smyrthwaite appeared to stand beside him imploring rescue and safety
upon that treacherously crumbling verge. His sense of her presence was so
acute, so overmastering in its intensity, that he felt in an instant more he
should hear her flat, colorless voice and be compelled—how unwillingly!—
to meet the fixed scrutiny of her pale, insatiable eyes.

Then, startling in its suddenness as the ping of a rifle-bullet, came a very

different sound to that of Joanna's toneless voice close at hand. For, with a
wrenching twang and thin, piercing, long-drawn vibration which shuddered
through the air, shuddered through every object in the room, strangely
setting in motion that pervasive scent of cedar and sandalwood, a string of
the piano broke.

Miss Beauchamp uttered an angry, yet smothered, cry, as one who

receives and resents an unexpected hurt. And Adrian, alarmed, agitated,
hardly understanding what had actually occurred, turning to her, perceived
that her countenance again had changed. Now it was that neither of sibyl
nor of jester, but vivid, keen with fight. Yet, even as he looked, it grew gray,
grief-smitten, immeasurably, frighteningly old.

Natural pity, and some inherited instinct of healing, made the young man
lean toward her and take her hand in his, holding and chafing it, while his
finger-tips sought and found the little space between the sinews of the wrist
where the tides of life ebb and flow. Her pulse was barely perceptible,
intermittent, weak as a thread.

Adrian took the other passive hand, and, chafing both, used this contact
as a conduit along which to transmit some of his own fine vitality. His act
of willing this transmission was conscious, determined, his concentration of
purpose great; so that presently, while he watched her, the grayness lifted,
her lips regained their normal color, her pulse steadied and strengthened,
and her face filled out, resuming its natural contours. Then as she moved sat
upright, smiling, an unusual softness in her expression.

"Don't attempt to speak yet," he said, still busy with and somewhat
excited by his work of restoration. "Rest a little. I have been a shameless
egoist this evening. I have talked too much, have made too heavy a demand
upon your sympathies, and so have exhausted you."

"Whatever you may have taken, you have more than paid back," she
answered. She was touched—a nostalgia being upon her for things no
longer possible, for youth and all the glory and sweetness of youth. "It is
not for nothing that you are the son of a famous physician and of a woman
of remarkable imaginative gifts," she went on. "You have la main heureuse,
life-giving both to body and spirit. This is a power and a great one. But now
that, thanks to you, my weakness is passed we will not remain in this room.
You said it was full of splendid echoes, good for the soul. It is rather too full
of them, since one's soul is still weighted with a body. I find them
oppressive in their suggestion and demand. Frankly, I dare not expose
myself to their influence any longer."

Helped by Adrian, she rose and, taking his arm, moved slowly toward
the doorway.
 "Sometimes, unexpectedly, the merciful dimness which holds our eyes is
broken up, giving place to momentary clear-seeing of all which lies beyond
and around the commonplace and conventional medium in which we live.
Unless one is rather abnormally constituted that clear-seeing is liable to
blind rather than to illuminate. Flesh and blood aren't quite equal to it. And
so with the snapping of the piano string. Doubtless the causes were simple
enough—some peculiar atmospheric conditions, along with the fact that the
instrument has been unused for many months. Still in me it produced one of
those fateful instants of clairvoyance. I knew it for the signing of a death-
warrant. Not my own. Thanks to the kindly ministrations of la main
heureuse the signature of that particular warrant is postponed for a while
yet. Nor yours either, of that I am convinced. I cannot say whose. The clear-
seeing was too rapidly obscured by failing bodily strength. I am not talking
nonsense. This has happened twice before. The second time a string broke
my brother's death followed within the year."

"And the first time?" Adrian felt impelled to ask. His recent expenditure
of will-power had left his nerves in a state of slightly unstable equilibrium
which rendered him highly impressionable.

"The first time?" Miss Beauchamp repeated, lifting her hand from his
arm. "The death of that other true lover, who listened here to my playing, of
the friend who walked with me in the hidden garden, followed the breaking
of the first string."

Adrian stepped forward and held aside the embroidered curtain, letting
her pass into the drawing-room. Here the air was lighter, the moral and
emotional atmosphere, as it seemed to him, lighter likewise. He was aware
of a relaxation of mental tension and a deadening of sensation which he at
once welcomed and regretted. He waited a few seconds until he was sure
that in his own case, too, any disquieting tendency to clairvoyance was over
and the conventional and commonplace had fairly come back.

Miss Beauchamp passed on into the first room of the suite. Here the
lights were turned on and he found her seated at a little supper-table,
vivacious, accentuated in aspect and manner, flaming pagoda of curls and
frisky cinnamon-colored, sequin-sewn tea-gown once again very much in
evidence. But these things no longer jarred on him. He could view them in
their true perspective, as the masquerade make-up with which a proud
woman elected—in self-defense—to disguise too deep a knowledge, too
sensitive a nature, and too passionate a heart.

"Yes, sit down, my dear Savage," she cried, "sit down. Eat and drink. For
really it is about time we both indulged in what are vulgarly called 'light
refreshments.' We have been surprisingly clever, you and I, and have rubbed
our wits together to the emission of many sparks! I am not a bit above
restoring wasted tissue in this practical manner—nor, I trust, are you.
Moreover, our lengthy discourse notwithstanding, I have still five words to
say to you. For, see, very soon Madame St. Leger's period of mourning will
be over. She will begin to go into society again."

"Alas! yes." Adrian sighed.

"You don't like it? Probably not. You would prefer keeping her, like
blessed St. Barbara, shut up on the top of her tower, I dare say. But doesn't
it occur to you that there are as insidious dangers on the tower top as in the
world below—visits from the little horror, M. René Dax, for example?
Anyhow, she will shortly very certainly descend from the tower. For we are
neither of us, I suppose, under the delusion she has buried all her joy of
living in poor Horace St. Leger's grave."

"I have no violent objection to her not having done so," Adrian said, with
becoming gravity.

"That first descent after her long seclusion will be critical. She will need
protection and advice."

"Her mother, Madame Vernois, is at hand," Adrian remarked, perhaps

rather tentatively.

"Yes, a sweet person and a devoted mother; but a little conspicuously

with the outlook and moral standards of a past generation. She is at once too
charitable and too humble-minded to be a judge of character—one born to
follow rather than to lead—and, though a woman of breeding and position,
always a provincial. She followed Professor Vernois as long as he was here
to follow. Then she followed her noble and needy relations away in
Chambéry. Now she follows her beautiful daughter. And the daughter, in the
near future, is going to be a mark for the archers—male and female.
Already I have reason to believe that archery practice has begun. The sweet,
timid mother, though perplexed and anxious, hasn't a notion how to turn
those arrows aside."

Miss Beauchamp gazed into the shallow depths of her wine-glass.

"It's an unsavory subject," she continued, "and, I agree with you,

Feminism has next to no legitimate excuse for existence here. That is just
why, I imagine, it has allied itself with ideas and practices not precisely
legitimate. It makes its appeal to by no means the most exalted elements of
our very mixed human nature."

"Ah! but," Adrian broke out in a white heat of anger, "it is not possible!
Such persons would never presume—"

"They have already presumed. Zélie de Gand, helped by I don't quite

know who, though I have my suspicions, has approached Madame St.
Leger. She is crazy to recover lost ground, to get herself and her clique
reinstated. Madame St. Leger's beauty, brains, and her reputation—so
absolutely unsullied and above suspicion—represent an immense asset to
any cause she may embrace."

"But need she embrace any cause?"

"My dear young man," Miss Beauchamp returned, smiling rather

broadly, "you had better take it for said, once and for all, that a beautiful
young woman of seven and twenty, who is beginning the world afresh after
being relieved of a not entirely satisfactory marriage, is perfectly certain to
embrace—well—well—Something, if she doesn't embrace Somebody."

Presently, after a silence, Anastasia spoke again, gently and seriously.

"I am altogether on your side," she said. "But I cannot pretend it is plain
sailing for you. There is a reserve of enthusiasm in her nature, an heroic
strain pushing her toward great enterprises. It may be she will suffer before
she arrives, will be led astray, will follow delusions. Her mind is critical
rather than creative. She is disposed to distrust her instincts and to reason
where she had ten thousand times better only feel. And, as I tell you, she
looks toward the future; the restless wind of it is upon her face, alluring,
exciting her. No—no—it is not plain sailing for you, my dear young man.
But, for Heaven's sake, don't let true love be your undoing, seducing you
from work, from personal achievement in your own admirable world of
letters. For remember, the greater your own success the more you have to
offer. And the modern woman asks that. She requires not merely Somebody
to whom to give herself, but Something which shall so satisfy her brain and
her ambitions as to make that supreme act of giving worth while."

Anastasia smiled wistfully, sadly.

"Yes, indeed, times have changed and the fashion of them! Man's
supremacy is very quaintly threatened. For the first time in the history of
the human race he finds sex at a discount.—But now good-night, my dear
Savage. Whenever you think I can help you, come. You will always be
welcome. And—this last word at parting—do your possible to keep that
little horror away from her. In him Modernity finds a most malign
embodiment. Farewell."

CHAPTER VI

RECORDING THE VIGIL OF A SCARLET

HOMUNCULUS AND
ARISTIDES THE JUST

The gray lemur sat before the fire in a baby's scarlet-painted cane chair.
He kept his knees well apart, so that the comfortable warmth, given off by
the burning logs and bed of glowing ashes, might reach his furry concave
stomach and the inside of his furry thighs. His long, ringed tail, slipped
neatly under the arm of the little scarlet chair, lay, like a thick gray note of
interrogation, upon the surface of the black Aubusson carpet. Now and
again he leaned his slender, small-waisted body forward, grasping the chair-
arms with his two hands—which resembled a baby's leather gloves with fur
backs to them—and advanced a sensitive, inquisitive, pointed muzzle
toward the blaze, his nose being cold. His movements were attractive in
their composure and restraint. For this quadrumanous exile from sub-tropic
Madagascan forests was a dignified little personage, not in the least
addicted, as the vulgar phrase has it, to giving himself away.

At first sight the lemur, sitting thus before the fire, appeared to be the
sole inhabitant of the bare white-walled studio. Then, as the eye became
accustomed to the dusky light, shed by hanging electric lamps with dark
smoked-glass shades to them, other queer living creatures disclosed their
presence.

At the end of the great room farthest from the door, where it narrowed in
two oblique angles under high, shelving skylights, in a glass tank—some
five feet by three and about two feet deep—set on a square of mosaic
pavement, goldfish swam lazily to and fro. In the center of the tank, about
the rockwork built up around the jet of a little tinkling fountain, small, dull-
hued tortoises with skinny necks and slimy carapaces and black-blotched,
orange-bellied, crested tritons crawled. While all round the room, forming a
sort of dado to the height of above five feet, ran an arabesque of scenes and
figures, some life-size, some even colossal, some minute and exquisitely
finished, some blurred and half obliterated, in places superimposed,
sketched one over the other to the production of madly nightmarish effects
of heads, limbs, trunks, and features attached, divided, flung broadcast,
heaped together in horrible promiscuosity. All were drawn boldly, showing
an astonishing vivacity of line and mastery of attitude and expression, in
charcoal or red and black chalk, or were washed in with the brush in Indian
ink and light red. In the dusky lamplight and scintillating firelight this
amazing decoration seemed endowed with life and movement, so that
shamelessly, in unholy mirth, hideousness, and depravity it stalked and
pranced, beckoned, squirmed, and flaunted upon those austerely snow-
white walls.
 For the rest, chairs, tables, easels, even the model's movable platform,
were, like the carpet, dead black. Two low, wide divans upholstered in black
brocade stood on either side of the deep outstanding chimney-breast; and
upon the farther one, masked by a red-lacquer folding screen, amid a huddle
of soft, black pillows, flat on its back, a human form reposed—but whether
of living man or of cleverly disposed lay figure remained debatable, since it
was shrouded from head to heel in a black silk resai, even the face being
covered, and its immobility complete.

On taking leave of Anastasia Beauchamp, Adrian Savage had found

himself in no humor either for work or for sleep. His search for the further
reason had led him a longer journey than he anticipated. And in some of its
stages that journey offered disquieting episodes. He admitted he was still
puzzled, still anxious; more than ever determined as to the final result, yet
hardly more clear as to how the result in question might be obtained. There
were points which needed thinking out, but to think them out profitably he
must regain his normal attitude of mind and self-possession. So, reckoning
it useless to go home to his well-found bachelor apartments in the rue de
l'Université, he decided to walk till such time as physical exercise had
regulated both his bodily and mental circulation.

It happened to be the moment of the turn-out of theaters and other places

of entertainment, and, as the young man made his way down toward the
Place de l'Opéra, the aspect of the town struck him as conspicuously
animated and brilliant. His eyes, still focused to the quiet English
atmosphere and landscape, were quick to note the contrast to these
presented by his existing surroundings. He invited impressions, looking at
the scene sympathetically, yet idly, as at the pages of a picture-book. Strong
effects of light and color held the ground plan, above which the tall, many-
windowed houses rose as some pale striated cliff-face toward the strip of
infinitely remote, star-pierced sky. It was sharply cold, and through the
exciting tumult of the streets he could detect a shrill singing of wind in
telegraph and telephone wires and amid the branches of the leafless trees. In
like manner, passing from the material to the moral plane, through the
accentuated vivacity of the amusement-seeking crowd, he seemed to detect,
as so often in Paris—is not that, indeed, half the secret of her magic and her
charm?—a certain instability and menace, a shrill singing of possible social
upheaval, of Revolution always there close at hand awaiting her surely
recurrent hour of opportunity.

To Adrian, after precedent-ridden, firmly planted, middle-class England

and the English, that effect of instability, that shrill singing of social
upheaval, proved stimulating. He breathed it in with conscious enjoyment
while negotiating thickly peopled pavements or madly tram- and- motor-
rushed crossings. For these dear Parisians, as he told himself, alike in mind
and in appearance, are both individual and individualists with a positive
vengeance, possessing not only the courage of their physical types—and
making, for beauty or the reverse, the very most of them—and the courage
of their convictions; but the courage of their emotions likewise. And how
refreshingly many are those emotions, how variegated, how incalculable,
how explosive! How articulate, too, ready at a moment's notice to justify
their existence by the discharge of salvos of impassioned rhetoric! If the
English might fairly be called a nation of pedants, these might, with at least
equal fairness, be called a nation of comedians; not in the sense of
pretending, of intentionally playing a part—to that affectation the English
were far more addicted—but in the sense of regarding themselves and life
from a permanently dramatic standpoint. Wasn't it worth while to have been
away for a time, since absence had so heightened his appreciation of racial
contrasts and power of recognizing them?

And there he paused in his pæan. For on second thoughts, were these
psychologic determinations so well worth the practical cost of them? Is gain
of the abstract ever worth loss in the concrete? His thought turned with
impatience to Stourmouth, to the Tower House and its inhabitants, and to
the loss of precious time which devotion to their affairs had, in point of fact,
caused him. Resultant appreciation of psychologic phenomena seemed but a
meager recompense for such expenditure. For this absence had made him
lose ground in relation to Madame St. Leger. Miss Beauchamp intimated as
much; intimated, too, that while he lost ground others had gained it, had
done their best to jump his claim, so to speak, and had, in a measure at
least, succeeded—take Mademoiselle Zélie de Gand, for example.

Whereupon Adrian ceased to take any interest, philosophic or otherwise,

in the wonderful midnight streets and midnight people; becoming himself
actively, even aggressively, individualist, as he brushed his way through the
throng, his expression the reverse of urbane and his pace almost headlong.

For who, in the devil's name, had dared give that much-discussed,
plausible, very astute and clever, also very much discredited arrivist and
novelist—Zélie de Gand—an introduction to Madame St. Leger? Miss
Beauchamp owned to a suspicion. And then, yes, of course he remembered
last year meeting the great Zélie at René Dax's studio! Remembered, too,
how René had pressed a short story of hers upon him for publication in the
Review; and had sulked for a week afterward when—not without laughter
—he had pronounced the said story quite clearly unprintable. Did René,
after all, represent the further reason, not as aspirant to la belle Gabrielle's
thrice-sacred hand indeed; but as her mental director, inciting her to throw
in her lot with agitators and extremists, Feminists, Futurists, and such-like
pestilent persons—enemies of marriage and of the family, of moral and
spiritual authority, of all sane canons of art, music and literature, reckless
anarchists in thought and purpose if not, through defective courage, in
actual deed? Was this what Anastasia Beauchamp hinted at? Was it against
risk of such abominable stabling of swine in his own particular Holy of
Holies—for the young man's anger and alarm, now thoroughly aroused,
tended to express themselves in no measured language—she did her best to
warn him?

Again, as earlier that day, a necessity for immediate and practical action
laid hold on him. Delay became not only intolerable, but unpardonable. He
must know, and he must also prevent this campaign of defilement and
outrage going further. Wherefore he bolted into the first empty cab, had
himself whirled to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and projected himself,
bomb-like, bursting with protest and indignation, into René Dax's great,
dusky, white-walled studio; to find, in the stillness, nothing more pertinent
to the matter in hand than the gentle, gray lemur sitting in its scarlet-painted
baby's chair before the fire, the orange-and-black blotched newts and small
ancient tortoises crawling upon the rock-work of the little fountain, while in
the glass tank the gleaming fishes swam lazily to and fro. Of the owner of
this quaint menagerie no signs were visible.
 But neither René's absence nor the presence of his queer associates held
Adrian's attention more than a few seconds; for, upon an easel facing him as
he entered, placed where the light of the hanging lamps fell strongest, was a
drawing in red chalk, which at once fed his anger by its subject and
commanded his unqualified admiration by its consummate beauty and art.

Nearly half life-size, the figure poised, the head slightly inclined,
proudly yet lovingly, toward the delicious child she carried on her arm,
Gabrielle St. Leger stepped toward him, as on air, from off the tall panel of
ivory-tinted cartridge paper. The attitude was precisely that in which he had
seen her this afternoon, when she told René Dax the "door should remain
open since little Bette wished it." The two figures were rendered with a
suavity, yet precision, of treatment, a noble assurance of line and
faithfulness of detail, little short of miraculous considering the time in
which the drawing must have been executed.—Yes, it was la belle
Gabrielle to the life; and alive—how wonderfully alive! The tears came
into the young man's eyes, so deeply did this counterfeit presentment of her
move him, and so very deeply did he love her. He noted, in growing
amazement, little details, even little blemishes, dear to his heart as a lover,
since these differentiated her beauty from that of other beautiful women,
giving the original, the intimate and finely personal note.

And then anger shook him more sharply than ever, for how dare any
man, save himself, note these infinitely precious, because exclusively
personal, touches? How dare René observe, still more how dare he record
them? His offense was rank; since to do so constituted an unpardonable
liberty, a gross intrusion upon her individuality. René knew too much, quite
too much, and, for the moment, Adrian was assailed by a very simple and
comprehensive desire to kill him.

But now a wave of humiliation, salt and bitter, submerged this unhappy
lover. For not only was that little devil of a Tadpole's drawing a masterpiece
in its realization of the outward aspect of Gabrielle St. Leger, but of insight
into the present workings of her mind and heart. Had not he apprehended
and set forth here, with the clarity and force of undeniable genius, just all
that which Anastasia Beauchamp had tried to tell him—Adrian Savage—
about her? What he, Adrian, notwithstanding the greatness of his devotion,
fumbled over and misinterpreted, René grasped unaided, and thus superbly
chronicled! For, here indeed, to quote Anastasia, Gabrielle's eyes were
turned toward the future and the strange unrestful wind—the wind of
Modernity—which blows from out the future, was upon her face; with the
result that her expression and bearing were exalted, a noble going forth to
meet fate in them, she herself as one consecrated, at once the embodiment
and exponent of some compelling idea, the leader of some momentous
movement, the elect spokeswoman of a new and tremendous age.

Beholding all which, poor Adrian's spirits descended with most

disintegrating velocity into his boots, and miserably camped at that abject
level. For though he might declare, and very honestly believe, the idea in
question, the movement in question, to be so much moonshine, and the
Spirit of the Age a rank impostor, how did he propose to convince Madame
St. Leger of that? The inquiry brought him up as against a brick wall. Yes,
Miss Beauchamp had been rather cruelly right when she told him his work
was cut out for him and would prove a mighty tough job. For what, calmly
considered, had he, after all, to offer as against those alluring and immense
perspectives?—Really, when he came to ask himself, it made him blush.—
Only an agreeable, fairly talented and well-conditioned young man—that
was all; and marriage—marriage, an old story to Gabrielle, a commonplace
affair about which she already knew everything that there is to know. Of
course she didn't know everything about it, he went on, plucking up a little
spirit again. Hers had been a marriage of convenience; a marriage of reason.
Poor Horace was by a whole generation her senior. Whereas, in the present
case, it all would be so different—a great and exclusive passion, et cetera, et
cetera. He would have liked to wax eloquent, descanting upon that
difference and its resultant illuminating values. But his eloquence stuck in
his throat somehow. Himself as a husband—humor compelled him to own,
with a pretty sharp stab of mortification, this a rather stale and meager
programme as alternative to cloudy splendors of self-consecration to the
mighty purposes of Modernity and the Spirit of the Age.

"She is very beautiful, is she not, my Madonna of the Future?"

René Dax asked the question in soft, confidential accents. He stood at

Adrian's elbow, clothed in a scarlet Japanese silk smoking-suit. Upon his
neat bare feet he wore a pair of black Afghan sandals. Uttering little loving,
crooning cries, the gray lemur balanced itself upon his shoulders, clasping
his great domed head with thin furry arms and furry-backed, black-palmed
hands, the finger-tips of which just met upon the center of his forehead.

"I have been watching, from behind the screen, the effect she produced
on you. I have given up going to bed, you see. I wrap myself in blankets
and quilts and sleep here—when I do sleep—upon one of the divans. It is
more artistic. It is simpler. The bed, when you come to consider it, is, like
the umbrella, the mark of the bourgeois, of the bourgeoise and of all their
infected progeny. It represents, as you may say, the battle-cry of middle-
class civilization. The domestic hearth? No, no. The domestic bed. How far
more scientific and philosophic a definition! Therefore I abjure it.—So I
was lying there on the divan in meditation. I am preparing illustrations for
an édition de luxe of Les Contes Drolatiques. It is not designed for family
reading. It will probably be printed in Belgium and sold at Port Said. I lie
on my back. I cover my face, thus isolating myself from contemplation of
surrounding objects, so that my imagination may play freely around those
agreeable tales. In the midst of my meditation I heard you burst in. At first I
felt annoyed. Then I arose silently and watched the effect this portrait
produced on you. I was rewarded; for it knocked the bluster pretty
effectually out of you, eh, mon vieux? I saw you droop, grow dejected, pull
your beard, wipe your eyes, eh? And you deserved all that, for your manner
was offensive this afternoon. You treated me disrespectfully. Have you now
come to apologize? It would be only decent you should do so. But I do not
press the point. I can afford to be magnanimous, since, in any case, I am
even with you. My Madonna is my revenge."

"I did not come to apologize, but to demand explanation," Adrian began,
hotly. Then his tone changed. Truly he was very unhappy, very heavy of
heart. "You are right," he added. "This drawing is your revenge."

"You do not like my drawing."

"On the contrary, I find it glorious, wonderful."

"And it hurts you?"

 "Yes, it hurts me," he answered hoarsely, backing away. "I hate it."

"I am so glad," René said, sweetly. He put his hand behind his scarlet
back, and tweaked the tip of the lemur's long furry tail affectionately.

"You hear, you rejoice with me, oh, venerable Aristides!" he murmured.

To which the little creature replied by clasping his head more tightly and
making strange, coaxing noises.

"But there,—for the moment my Madonna has done precisely what I

asked of her, so now let us talk about something else, mon vieux, something
less controversial. Why not? For here, after all, she is fixed, my Madonna.
She can't run away, happily. We can always return and, though she is mine,
I will permit you to take another look at her. So—well—do you remark how
I have changed my decorative scheme since you last visited me? Is it
original, startling, eh? That is what I intended. Again I felt the need to
simplify. I called for plasterers, painters, upholsterers. When they will be
paid I haven't a conception; but that is a contemptible detail. I rushed them.
I harried them. I drove them before me like a flock of geese, a troop of
asses. 'Work,' I screamed, 'work. Delay is suffocation to my imagination.
This transformation must be effected instantly.' For suddenly color sickened
me. I comprehended what a fraud, what a subterfuge and inanity it is. Form
alone matters, alone is permanent and essential. Color bears to form the
same relation which emotion bears to reason, which sensation bears to
intellect. It represents an attitude rather than an entity. I recognized it as
adventitious, accidental, unscientific, hysterical. So I had them all washed
out, ripped off, obliterated, my tender, tearful blues and greens, my
caressing pinks, my luscious mauves and purples, my rapturously bilious,
sugar-sweet yellows, all my adorably morbid florescence of putrifaction in
neutral-tinted semi-tones, and limited my scheme to this harshly symbolic
triad. See everywhere, everywhere, black, white, red—these three always
and only—beating upon my brain, feeding my eyes with thoughts of
darkness, night, death, the bottomless pit, despair, iniquity; of light, day,
snow, the colorless ether, virtue, the child's blank soul, immaculate sterility.
And then red—red, the horrid whipper-in and huntsman of us all, meaning
life, fire, lust, pain, carnage, sex, revolution and war, scarlet-lipped scorn
and mockery—the raw, gaping, ever-bleeding, ever-breeding wound, in
short, upon the body of the Cosmos which we call Humanity."

The young man's affectation of imperturbability for once deserted him.

He was shaken by the force of his own speech. His voice rose, vibrating
with passion, taking on, indeed, an almost maniacal quality, highly
distressing to Adrian and altogether terrifying to the lemur, which moaned
audibly and shivered as it clutched at his forehead.

"Get down, Aristides," he cried with sudden childish petulance. "Unclasp

your hands. You scratch. You hurt me. Go back to your little chair. I am
tired. I have worked too hard. The back of my head stabs with pain. I suffer,
I suffer so badly."

He came close to Adrian, who, his nerves too very much on edge, still
stood before the noble drawing of Gabrielle St. Leger.

"I am not well," he said, plaintively. "Certainly I have overworked, and it

is all your fault. Yet listen, mon vieux. Your affection is necessary to me.
Therefore do not let us quarrel. I own you enraged me this afternoon. I did
not want you just then."

"Nor I you," Adrian returned, with some asperity.

"And your manner was at once insufferably brusque and insufferably

possessive. I could not let it pass. I felt it incumbent upon me to administer
correction. But I would not descend to anything commonplace in the way of
chastisement. I would lay an ingenious trap for you. I came straight home. I
seated myself here. I set up this panel, and I drew, and drew, and drew,
without pause, without food, in a tense frenzy of concentration, of
recollection, till I had completed this portrait. I was possessed, inspired.
Never have I worked with such fury, such torment and ecstasy. For I had, at
once, to assure myself of your sentiments toward the subject of that picture,
and to read you a lesson. I had to prove to you that I, too, amount to
something which has to be reckoned with; that I, too, have power."

"You have commanding power," Adrian answered, bitterly. "The power

of genius."
 "Then, then," René Dax cried, "since you acknowledge my power, will
you consent to leave my Madonna alone? Will you consent not to make any
further attempt to interfere between her and me, to pay court to and marry
her?"

The attack in its directness proved, for the moment, staggering. Adrian
stood, his eyes staring, his mouth half open, actually recovering his breath,
which seemed fairly knocked out of him by the amazing impudence of this
proposition. Yet wasn't it perfectly in the part? Wasn't it just exactly the
egregious Tadpole all over? His mind swung back instinctively to scenes of
years ago in play-ground, class-room, dormitory, when—while though
himself exasperated—he had intervened to protect René, a boy brilliant as
he was infuriating, from the consequences of some colossal impertinence in
word or deed. And that swing back to recollection of their school-days
produced in Adrian a salutary lessening of nervous excitement, restoring his
self-confidence, focusing his outlook, both on events and persons to a
normal perspective.

"So that I may leave the stage conveniently clear for you, mon petit?" he
inquired, quite good-temperedly. "No, I am sorry, but I'm afraid I cannot
consent to do anything of the kind."

And then he moved away across the studio, leaving the egregious
Tadpole to digest his refusal. For he did not want to quarrel, either. Far from
it. That instinctive throw-back into their school-boy friendship brought
home to him how very much attached to this wayward being he actually
was. So that, of all things, he wanted to avoid a quarrel, if such avoidance
were consonant with restraint of René's influence in a certain dear direction
and development of his own.

"Nothing will turn me from my purpose, mon petit," he said, gently, even
gaily, over his shoulder. "Nothing—make sure of that—nothing, nobody,
past, present, or to come."

He proceeded, with slightly ostentatious composure, to study the dado of

pictured figures rioting along the surface of the white distempered walls. He
had delivered his ultimatum. Very soon he meant to depart, for it was no use
attempting to hold further intercourse with René to-night. Once you brought
him up short, like this, for a greater or lesser period he was certain to sulk.
It was wisest to let him have his sulk out. And—his eyes growing
accustomed to the dusky light—good heavens, how superbly clever, how
grossly humorous those pictured figures were! Was there any draftsman
living who could compare with René Dax? No, decidedly he didn't want to
quarrel with the creature. He only wanted to prevent his confusing certain
issues and doing harm. Yet, as he passed from group to group, from one
outrageous witticism to another, the difficulty of maintaining an equable
attitude increased upon him. For it was hateful to remember that the same
hand and brain which had projected that heroic portrait of Madame St.
Leger was responsible for these indecencies as well. Looking at some of
these, thinking of that, he could have found it in his heart, he feared, to take
Master René by the throat and put an end to his drawing for ever, so
atrocious a profanity did such coexistence, such, in a sense, correlation
appear.

And then, moving on again, he started and drew back in absolute

consternation. For there, right in front of him, covering the wall for a space
of two yards or more, he came on a series of sketches—some dashed in in
charcoal, some carefully finished in red and black chalk—of Joanna
Smyrthwaite.—Joanna, arrayed in man's clothing, a slovenly, ragged jacket
suit, sagging from her thin limbs and angular shoulders; she bareheaded,
moreover, her hair cropped, her face telling of drink and dissipation, loose-
lipped, repulsive to the point of disgust in its weakness and profligate
misery, her attitudes degraded, almost bestial as she cringed on all fours or
lay heaped together like so much shot rubbish.

Adrian put his hands over his eyes. Looked again. Turned indignantly to
demand an answer to this hideous riddle. But his host had disappeared.
Only the gray lemur sat in its scarlet-painted baby's chair before the fire;
and from off the tall white panel Gabrielle St. Leger, carrying her child on
her arm, stepped forth to meet the Future, while the unrestful wind which
blows from out the Future—the fateful wind of Modernity—played upon
her beloved face.
 III

THE OTHER SIDE

CHAPTER I

RECORDING A BRAVE MAN'S EFFORT TO

CULTIVATE HIS
PRIVATE GARDEN

Joseph Challoner telephoned up to Heatherleigh from his office in

Stourmouth that, being detained by business, he should dine in town to-
night. This seemed to him the safest way to manage it, since you never
could be quite sure how far your servants didn't shadow you.

He had put off dealing with the matter in question from day to day, and
week to week, because, in plain English, he funked it. True, this was not his
first experience of the kind; but, looking back upon other—never mind
about the exact number of them—other experiences of like nature, this
struck him as very much the most unpleasant of the lot. His own moral and
social standpoint had changed; there perhaps—he hoped so—was the
reason. In more senses than one he had "come up higher," so that anything
even distantly approaching scandal was actively alarming to him, giving
him—as he expressed it—"the goose-skin all over." Yet, funk or no funk,
the thing had to be seen to. Further shilly-shallying was not permissible.
The by-election for the Baughurst Park Ward, vacant through the impending
retirement of Mr. Pottinger, was imminent. Challoner had offered himself as
a candidate. The seat was well worth gaining, since the Baughurst Park
Ward was the richest and, in many respects, most influential in the borough.
To represent it was, with a little adroit manipulation, to control a very large
amount of capital available for public purposes. Moreover, in a year or so it
must inevitably lead to the mayoralty; and Joseph Challoner fully intended
one of these days to be Mayor of Stourmouth. Not only did the mayoralty,
in itself, confer much authority and local distinction, but it offered collateral
opportunities of self-advancement. Upon these Challoner had long fixed his
thoughts, so that already he had fully considered what course of action, in
the present, promised the most profitable line of investment in view of that
coveted future.

Should he push the construction of the new under-cliff drive, for

instance? But, as he argued, at most you could invite a Duke or Field-
Marshal to perform the opening ceremony—the latter for choice, since it
gives legitimate excuse for the military display, always productive of
enthusiasm in a conspicuously non-combatant population such as that of
Stourmouth. Unfortunately Dukes and Field-Marshals, though very useful
when, socially speaking, you could not get anything better, were not
altogether up to Challoner's requirements. He aspired, he in fact languished,
to entertain Royalty. But under-cliff drives were no use in that connection,
only justifying a little patriotic beating of drums to the tune of coast
defense, and incidental trotting-out of the hard-worked German invasion
bogey. The first came too near party politics, the second too near family
relationships, to be acceptable to the highest in the land. No, as he very well
saw, you must sail on some other tack, cloaking your designs with the
much-covering mantle of charity if you proposed successfully to exploit
princes.

And, after all, what simpler? Was not Stourmouth renowned as a health
resort, and are not hospitals the accredited highroad to royal favor? A
hospital, evidently; and, since it is always safest to specialize—that enables
you to make play with scare-inducing statistics and impressive scientific
formulæ, flavoring them here and there with the sentimental anecdotal note
—clearly a hospital for the cure of tuberculosis—nothing just now more
fashionable, nothing more popular! Really, it suited him to a tee, for had not
his own poor little wife fallen a victim to the fell disease in question? And
had not he—here Challoner just managed not to put his tongue in his cheek
—had not he remained, through all these long, long years, affectingly
faithful to her memory? Therefore, not only upon the platform, but during
the private pocket-pickings he projected among the wealthy residents of the
Baughurst Park Ward, he could give a personal turn to his appeal by
alluding feelingly to the cutting short of his own early married happiness, to
the pathetic wreck of "love's young dream" all through the operation of that
terrible scourge, consumption. Yes, quite undoubtedly, tuberculosis was, as
he put it, "the ticket."

He remembered, with a movement of active gratitude toward his Maker

—or was it perhaps toward that quite other deity, the God of Chance, so
ardently worshiped by all arrivists?—the big stretch of common, Wytch
Heath, just beyond the new West Stourmouth Cemetery, recently thrown on
the market and certain to go at a low figure. Lying so high and dry, the air
up there must be remarkably bracing—fit to cut you in two, indeed, when
the wind was northerly. Clearly it was a crying shame to waste so much
salubrity upon the dead! True, Stourmouth already bristled with sanatoria of
sorts. But these were, for the most part, defective in construction or obsolete
in equipment; whereas his, Challoner's, new Royal Hospital should be
absolutely up to date, furnished, regardless of expense, in accordance with
the latest costly fad of the latest pathological faddist. No extravagance
should be debarred, while, incidentally, handsome measure of commissions
and perquisites should be winked at so as to keep the staff, both above and
below stairs, in good humor. Salaries must be on the same extensive scale
as the rest. Later, when a certain personal end had been gained, it would be
plenty time enough to placate protesting subscribers by discovering
reprehensible waste, and preaching reform and retrenchment.

Finally, Royalty should be humbly prayed to declare the record-breaking

institution open, during his, Challoner's, tenure of office. He licked his lips,
not figuratively but literally, thinking of it. "Our public-spirited and
philanthropic Mayor, to whose generous expenditure of both time and
money, combined with his untiring zeal in the service of his suffering
fellow-creatures, we are mainly indebted for the inception and completion
of this truly magnificent charity," et cetera, et cetera. Let them pile on the
butter, bless them—he could put up with any amount of that kind of basting
—until Royalty, impressed alike by the magnitude of his altruistic labors
and touched by the tragedy of his early sorrow—for the sentimental
personal chord should here be struck again softly—would feel constrained
to bestow honors on so deeply tried and meritorious a subject. "Sir Joseph
Challoner."—He turned the delicious phrase over in his mouth, as a small
boy turns a succulent lollipop, to get the full value and sweetness out of it.
He amplified the luscious morsel, almost blushingly. "Sir Joseph and Lady
Challoner"—not the poor little first wife, well understood, with the fatal
stamp of disease and still more fatal stamp of her father's shop upon her,
reminiscences of whose premature demise had contributed so tactfully to
the realization of his present splendor; but the second, the coming wife, in
the serious courting of whom he thirsted to embark immediately, since she
offered such conspicuous contrast to the said poor little first one both in
solid fortune and social opportunity.

Only, unluckily, before these bright unworldly dreams could even

approximately be translated into fact, there was a nasty awkward bit of
rooting up and clearing out to be done in, so to speak, Challoner's own
private back garden. And it was with a view to effecting such clearance,
quietly, unobserved and undisturbed, that he elected to-night to eat a third-
rate dinner at an obscure commercial tavern in Stourmouth, where
recognition was improbable, rather than a first-rate one in his own
comfortable dining-room at Heatherleigh.

After the consummation of that unattractive meal, he took a tram up

from The Square to the top of Hill Street, where this joins the Barryport
Road about three-quarters of a mile short of Baughurst Park and the County
Gates. Here, alighting, he turned into the maze of roads, bordered by villas
and small lodging-houses interspersed with undeveloped plots of building
land, which extends from the left of the Barryport Road to the edge of the
West Cliff. The late March evening was fine and keen, and Challoner,
whose large frame cried out for exercise after a long day of sedentary
employment, would have relished the walk in the moist salt air had it not
been for that disagreeable bit of back-garden clearing work looming up as
the ultimate purpose of it.
 In the recesses of his mind, moreover, lurked an uneasy suspicion that he
would really be very much less of a cur if he felt a good deal more of one.
This made him savage, since it appeared a reflection upon the purity of his
motives and the solid worth of his character. He stated the case to himself,
as he had stated it any number of times already, and found it a convincingly
clear one. Still that irritating suspicion of insufficient self-disgust continued
to haunt him. He ran through the well-worn arguments again, pleading the
justice of his own cause to his own conscience. For, when all is said and
done, how can any man possessing an average allowance of susceptibility
resist a pretty, showy woman if she throws herself at his head? And Mrs.
Gwynnie had very much thrown herself at his head, pertinaciously coaxed,
admired and flattered him. Whatever had taken place was more than half
her doing—before God it was. He might have been weak, might have been
a confounded fool even; but then, hadn't every man, worth the name, a soft
side to him? Take all your famous heroes of history—weren't there funny
little tales about every one of them, from the Royal Psalmist downward? If
he, Challoner, had been a fool, he could quote plenty of examples of that
particular style of folly among the most aristocratic company. And, looking
at the actual facts, wasn't the woman most to blame? Hadn't she run after
him just all she knew how? Hadn't she subjected him to a veritable
persecution?

But now Challoner found himself at the turn into Silver Chine Road, the
long, yellow-gray web of which meandered away through the twilight,
small detached houses set in little gardens ranged on either side of it
shoulder to shoulder, the walls of them shrouded by creepers, and their
lower windows—where lights glowed faintly through muslin curtains and
drawn blinds—masked by luxuriant growth of arbutus, escallonia,
euonymus, myrtle and bay. Now and again a solitary Scotch fir, relic of the
former moorland, raised its dense crown, velvet black, against the sulphur-
stained crystal of the western sky. Stourmouth is nothing if not well-
groomed and neat, so that roads, fences, lawns and houses looked brushed
up, polished and dusted as some show-case exhibit. Only a misanthropic
imagination could suppose questionable doings or primitive passions
sheltering behind those tidy, clean-pinafored, self-respecting gray and red
house-fronts, in their setting of trim turf, beds of just-opening snowdrops
and crocuses, and fragrant glossy-leaved shrubs.
 Joseph Challoner drew up and stood, in large vexation and worry,
contemplating the pleasant, well-to-do prospect. The alert calm of an early
spring evening held the whole scene. Faintly, in the distance, he could hear
a long-drawn murmur of wind in the Baughurst woods and the rhythmic
plunge of the sea. And he was aware that—still to employ his own not very
graceful vernacular—he funked the business in hand, consciously and very
thoroughly funked it. He had all the mind in the world to retrace his steps,
board the tram again and get home to Heatherleigh. He took off his hat,
hoping the chill, moist air might cool his tall brick-dust-red face and bare
head, while he fenced thus grimly with indecision. For it had come to that—
he had grown so ignominiously chicken-livered—had he the pluck to go on
or should he throw up the game? Let the whole show slide, in short—
Baughurst Park Ward, record-breaking hospital, probable mayoralty,
possible knighthood, wealthy second wife, whose standing and ample
fortune would lift him to the top of the best society Stourmouth could offer
—and all for the very inadequate reason that a flimsy, flirtatious,
impecunious little Anglo-Indian widow had elected to throw her bonnet
over the windmills for his sake? To Challoner it seemed hard, beastly hard,
he should be placed in such a fix. How could he be certain, moreover, that it
was for his sake, and not mainly for her own, she had sent that precious bit
of millinery flying? What assurance had he that it wasn't a put-up job to
entangle and land him, not for love of him himself, of what he was, but for
love of what he'd got?

Challoner dragged his handkerchief out of his shirt-cuff and wiped his
forehead. Of all his amatory experiences this one did, without question,
"take the cake" for all-round inconvenience and exasperation!

Of course, he went on again, picking up the thread of the argument, if he

could be convinced, could believe in the sincerity of her affection, be
certain it was he, himself, whom she really loved and wanted, not just
Heatherleigh and a decent income, that would make just all the difference,
put matters on an absolutely different footing and radically alter his feeling
toward her.

And then, with a horse-laugh, he spat on the ground, regardless of the

Stourmouth Borough Council's by-law prohibiting "expectoration in a
public place under penalty of a fine not exceeding twenty shillings." The lie
was so transparent, the hypocrisy so glaring, that, although no stickler for
truth where the truth told against him, he was obliged to rid himself of this
particular violation of it in some open and practical manner. For he knew
perfectly well that her love, whether for the man or merely for his
possessions, in no appreciable degree affected the question. Not doubt as to
the quality or object of Mrs. Gwynnie's affections, but rank personal
cowardice in face of the situation, kept him standing here in this
contemptible attitude of indecision amid the chill sweetness of the spring
dusk.

Yet that coarse outward repudiation of inward deceit, if failing to make

him a better man morally, had emotionally, and even physically, a beneficial
effect. It braced him somehow, so that he squared his shoulders, while his
native bullying pluck, his capacity of cynically measuring himself against
fact and taking the risks of the duel, revived in him.

For this shilly-shallying didn't pay. And it wasn't like him. Every man
has a soft side to him—granted; but he'd be hung if he was going to let
himself turn a softie all over! The smart of his own gibes stimulated him
wonderfully, so that in the pride of his recovered strength of mind, and
consciousness of his brawny strength of body, he found himself growing
almost sentimentally sorry for the fate of his puny adversary. Poor little
soul, perhaps she really was in love with him!—Challoner wiped his face
again with a flourish. Well, plenty of people did call him "a splendid-
looking man"! All the same, she'd got to go under. She must be rooted up
and cleared out. He was sorry, for it's always a nasty thing for a woman to
be made to understand she is only a side-show in a man's life. Only if he
meant to stand for the Baughurst Park Ward—and unquestionably he did
now mean to do so—his address to the electors must be printed and
distributed and his canvass started within the week. Yes, no doubt very, very
sorry for her, still he was bound to make short work with this rooting up and
clearing out of poor Mrs. Gwynnie.

Nor did his election supply the only reason against further shilly-shally.
Here Challoner cleared his throat, while the brick-dust of his complexion
deepened to crimson. It was funny how shy the thought of Margaret
Smyrthwaite always turned him! But when once the winding up of old
Montagu Smyrthwaite's estate was completed, he would no longer have a
legitimate excuse for dropping in at the Tower House at odd hours,
indulging in nice confidential little chats with Margaret in the blue sitting-
room or taking a tête-à-tête stroll with her around the gardens and through
the conservatories. Miss Joanna did not like him, he was sure of that. She
certainly wouldn't give him encouragement. So time pressed, for the
completion of the winding up of the estate could not be delayed much
longer. Montagu Smyrthwaite had left his affairs in quite vexatiously good
order, from Challoner's point of view, thereby obliging the latter to expend
much ingenuity in the invention of obstacles to the completion of business.
His object was to keep Adrian Savage out of England and away from his
cousins as long as possible. But the young man—with how much heartiness
Challoner consigned him and all his works and ways to regions infernal!—
might grow suspicious and run over from Paris just to hasten matters. That
would not suit Challoner's little game in the least. He must make certain of
his standing with Margaret before that most unwelcome descent of the
enemy.

For the whole matter of Adrian Savage had become to him as the
proverbial red rag to a bull. By its irritating associations it acted very
sensibly upon him now, causing him to charge down the road headlong,
with his heavy, lunging tread. Had Adrian proved a bad man of business,
ignorant, careless, or bungling, Challoner felt his superiority in other
departments might have been more easily stomached. But to find this highly
polished man of the world as smart a business man as his somewhat
unpolished and provincial self rubbed him very shrewdly on the raw. When,
with an eye to a not impossible future, he essayed so to jockey affairs as to
secure some advantage to Margaret Smyrthwaite, in the disposition of her
father's property, Adrian invariably detected the attempted small swindle
and promptly, though politely, checkmated it.

Such encounters had occurred more than once; and both his own failure
and Adrian's adroitness in disposing of them rankled so much still that
Challoner walked nearly half the length of Silver Chine Road absorbed in
disagreeable remembrance. Then the name on a gate-post, which happened
Welcome to our website – the perfect destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. We believe that every book holds a new world,
offering opportunities for learning, discovery, and personal growth.
That’s why we are dedicated to bringing you a diverse collection of
books, ranging from classic literature and specialized publications to
self-development guides and children's books.

More than just a book-buying platform, we strive to be a bridge

connecting you with timeless cultural and intellectual values. With an
elegant, user-friendly interface and a smart search system, you can
quickly find the books that best suit your interests. Additionally,
our special promotions and home delivery services help you save time
and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Join us on a journey of knowledge exploration, passion nurturing, and

personal growth every day!

ebookbell.com