The Author of Beltraffio

, as if, an hour before, the housemaids had been turned into it with their dust-pans and feather-brushes. I almost hesitated to light a cigarette and was doubly startled when, in the a

her for news of her little nephew-to express the hope she had heard he was better. She was able to gratify this trust-she spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day. We walked through the shrubberies together and she gave

that so soon!" Miss Ambient retur

leaded, "she saw

e you! Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a 'purpose.' But she's a ch

. "But there hasn't been any of the sort of trouble that there so often is among married people," she said. "I suppose you can judge for yourself that Beatrice isn't at all-well, whatever they call it when a woman kicks over! And poor Mark doesn't make love to other people either. You might think he would, but I assure you he doesn't. All the same of course, from her point of view, you know, she has a dread of my brother's influence on the child on the formation of his character, his 'ideals,' poor little brat, his principles. It's as if it were a subtle poison or a contagion-som

e, in those early days of acquaintance with English objects, but part of the general texture of the small dense landscape, which looked as if the harvest were gathered by the shears and with all nature bleating and braying for the violence. Everything was full of expression for Mark Ambient's visitor-from the big bandy-legged geese whose whiteness was a "note" amid all the tones of green as they wandered beside a neat little oval pool, the foreground of a thatched and whitewashed inn, with a grassy approach and a pictorial sign-from these humble wayside animals to the crests of high woods which let a gable or a pinnacle peep here and there and looked even at a distance like trees of good company, conscious of an individual profile. I admired the hedge-rows, I plucked the faint-hued heather, and I was for ever stopping to say how charming I thought the threa

th regard to the number of his admirers-he could never so far have deceived himself as to believe he was popular, but I at least then judged (and had occasion to be sure later on) that stupidity ruffled him visibly but little, that he had an air of thinking it quite natural he should leave many simple folk, tasting of him, as simple as ever he found them, and that he very seldom talked about the newspapers, which, by the way, were always even abnormally vulgar about him. Of course he may have thought them over-the newspapers-night and day; the only point I make is that he didn't show it while at the same time he didn't strike one as a man actively on his guard. I may add that, touching his hope of making the work on which he was then engaged the best of his books, it was only partly carried out. That place belongs incont

Ambient? You've the frees

while I have to be so careful not to let a drop of the liquor escape! When I see the kind of things Life herself, the brazen hussy, does, I despair of ever catching her peculiar trick. She has an impudence, Life! If one risked a fiftieth part of the effects she risks! It takes ever so long to believe it. You don't know yet, my dear youth. It isn't till one has been watching her some forty years that one finds out half of what she's up to! Therefore one's earlier things must inevitably conta

ough which people look into it-that's what your w

h the one with which I've to content myself. Life's really too short for art-one hasn't time to make one's shell ideally hard. Firm and bright, firm and bright is very well to say-the devilish thing has a way sometimes of being bright, and even of being hard, as mere tough frozen pudding is hard, without bein

very bad," I said a

f I knew I should be publicly thrashed else I'd manage to find the true word. The people who can't-some of them don't

it was at any rate through the receipt of this impression that by the time we returned I had gained the sense of intimacy with him that I have noted. Before we got up for the homeward stretch he alluded to his wife's having once-or perhaps more than once-asked him whether he should like Dolcino to read "Beltraffio." He must hav

hide them-to lock them up in a dr

intended for small boys. If you bring him u

hen he was about fifteen, say; and I asked her husband if it were hi

names, and my wife would tell you it's the difference between Christian and Pagan. I may be a pagan, but I don't like the name; it sounds sectarian. She thinks me at any rate no better than an ancient Greek. It's the difference between making the most of life and making the least, so that you'll get another better one in some other time and place. Will it be a sin to make the most of that one, too, I wonder; and shall we have to be bribed off in the future state as well as in the present? Perhaps I care too much for beauty-I don't know, I doubt if a poor devil can; I delight in it, I adore it, I think of it continually, I try to produce it, to reproduce it. My wife holds that we shouldn't cultivate or e

t-to be so explanatory; and surprised even now that Mark shouldn't have shown visibly that he wondered what the deuce

the declaration. "It's very strange when one thinks it all over, and there's a grand comicality in it that I should like to bring out. She's a very nice woman, extraordinarily well-behaved, upright and clever and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a novel-she has explained it to me once or twice, and she doesn't do it badly as exposition-is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It's a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It's two different ways of looking at the whole affair," he repeated, pushing open the gate. "And they're irreconcilable!" he added

sband she had come to seem to me almost a sinister personage. Yet the signs of a sombre fanaticism were not more immediately striking in her than before; it was only after a while that her air of incorruptible conformity, her tapering monosyllabic correctness, began to affect me as in themselves a cold thin flame. Certainly, at first, she resembled a woman with as few passions as possible; but if she had a passion at all it would indeed be that of Philistinism. She might have been (for there are guardian-spirits, I suppose, of all great principles) the very angel of the pink of p

d risen from our own meal Mark slipped away, evidently for the purpose of going to his child; and no sooner had I observed this than I became aware his wife had simultaneously vanished. It happened that Miss Ambient and I, both at the same moment, saw the tail of her dress whisk out of a doorway; an incident that led the young lady to smile at me as if I now knew all the secrets of the Ambients. I passed with her into the garden and we sat down on a dear old bench that rested against the west wall of the house. It was a perfect spot for the middle period of a Sunday in June, and its felicity seemed to come partly from an antique sun

y allowed, though I remembered

some of his theorie

" I was very particular, for Miss

everything?" she p

of cour

hink beauty's

ink we should use as little as possi

d of this modest desire. "And one must be good, at any rate, must not one?" she pursued with a dubious quaver-an intimation apparently that what I might say one way or the other would settle it for her. It was difficult for me to be very original in reply, and I'm afraid I repaid her confidence with an unblushing platitude. I remember, moreover, attaching to it an inquiry, equally destitute of freshness and still more wa

I scarcely believed. "Surely his

s regards most matters one can easily say what, in a given situation, my sister-in-

you mean in the cons

my sister-in-

elements of anxiety," I concurred.

nts of affection, elements of

I wished she would go and write her letters. "His father will have seen h

this morning," she promptly return

stined by nature to take opposite views, the only thing for the mother was to cultivate a false optimism. In Mark's absence and that of his betrayed fear she would have been less easy. I remembered what he had said to me about their dealings with their son-that between them they'd probably put an end to him; but I didn't repeat this to Miss Ambient: the less so that just then her brother emerged from the house, carrying the boy in his arms. Close behind him moved his wife, grave and pale; the little sick face was turned over Ambient's shoulder and towar

l than the day before. He had been dressed in his festal garments-a velvet suit and a crimson sash-and he

e's not a bit at his e

and on your feet, my b

uickly responded. "Oh y

shining pointed shoes with enormous

m up and, in a moment, holding him on her knees, took her place on the bench where Miss Ambient and I had been sitting.