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Henry Wimbush was still deep in his account books; he had just made the discovery that Sir Ferdinando was in the habit of eating oysters the whole summer through, regardless of the absence of the justifying R. Gombauld, in horn-rimmed spectacles, was reading. Jenny was mysteriously scribbling in her red notebook.
"I'm at a loss to know whether you're more silly or more rude." After painting for a little time in silence Gombauld began to speak again. "And then there's Denis," he said, renewing the conversation as though it had only just been broken off. "You're playing the same game with him. Why can't you leave that wretched young man in peace?" Anne flushed with a sudden and uncontrollable anger.
I informed him that Lord Hailes, who had promised to furnish him with some anecdotes for his Lives of the Poets, had sent me three instances of Prior's borrowing from Gombauld, in Recueil des Poetes, tome 3. Epigram To John I owed 'great obligation, p. 25. To the Duke of Noailles, p. 32. Sauntering Jack and Idle Joan, p. 25.
"And I hope you will not find it uninteresting," he added modestly. "Our muniment room is particularly rich in ancient records, and I have some genuinely new light to throw on the introduction of the three-pronged fork." "And the people?" asked Gombauld. "Sir Ferdinando and the rest of them were they amusing? Were there any crimes or tragedies in the family?"
"Blight, Mildew..." she was forced to the conclusion, reluctantly, that Denis had indeed pronounced those improbable words. He had deliberately repelled her attempts to open a serious discussion. That was horrible. A man who would not talk seriously to a woman just because she was a woman oh, impossible! Egeria or nothing. Perhaps Gombauld would be more satisfactory.
They paced off slowly, side by side. "What I like about the painting of Degas..." Anne began in her most detached and conversational tone. "Oh, damn Degas!" Gombauld was almost shouting. From where he stood, leaning in an attitude of despair against the parapet of the terrace, Denis had seen them, the two pale figures in a patch of moonlight, far down by the pool's edge.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay. Let us be duly thankful for that, my dear Denis duly thankful," he repeated, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe. Denis was not listening. He had suddenly remembered Anne. She was with Gombauld alone with him in his studio.
Henry Wimbush's school-fellow and exact contemporary, Mr. Scogan looked far older and, at the same time, far more youthfully alive than did that gentle aristocrat with the face like a grey bowler. Mr. Scogan might look like an extinct saurian, but Gombauld was altogether and essentially human.
"I think I shall go and bathe," said Anne. "It's so hot." The opportunity had passed. Mr. Wimbush had taken them to see the sights of the Home Farm, and now they were standing, all six of them Henry Wimbush, Mr. Scogan, Denis, Gombauld, Anne, and Mary by the low wall of the piggery, looking into one of the styes. "This is a good sow," said Henry Wimbush. "She had a litter of fourteen. "Fourteen?"
A serious book about artists regarded as artists is unreadable; and a book about artists regarded as lovers, husbands, dipsomaniacs, heroes, and the like is really not worth writing again. Jean-Christophe is the stock artist of literature, just as Professor Radium of 'Comic Cuts' is its stock man of science." "I'm sorry to hear I'm as uninteresting as all that," said Gombauld.
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