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He felt, poor Peter, bewildered. There seemed to be, on every side of him, so many things that he was called upon to manage and he was so unable to manage any of them. He stopped in his treading to and fro and stared at the long deal writing-table at which he always worked. There, waiting for him, were the first chapters of his new novel, "Mortimer Stant."
Thus, finally, she again dropped her eyes on it, drawing in her lips a little. "No I call it grave." "Ah, then, I don't want it." "Very grave," said Charlotte Stant. "Well, what did I tell you of him?" he asked, rejoicing, as they started: a question for all answer to which, before she took his arm, the girl thrust her paper, crumpled, into the pocket of her coat.
Charlotte Stant, at such an hour, in a shabby four-wheeler and a waterproof, Charlotte Stant turning up for him at the very climax of his special inner vision, was an apparition charged with a congruity at which he stared almost as if it had been a violence.
"Yes, that's what it comes to," said Charlotte Stant. "And why," he asked, almost soothingly, "should it be terrible?" He couldn't, at the worst, see that. "Because it's always so the idea of having to pity people." "Not when there's also, with it, the idea of helping them." "Yes, but if we can't help them?" "We CAN we always can. That is," he competently added, "if we care for them.
Every evening, after dinner, Charlotte Stant played to him; seated at the piano and requiring no music, she went through his "favourite things" and he had many favourites with a facility that never failed, or that failed but just enough to pick itself up at a touch from his fitful voice.
"Don't you think he's charming?" "Oh, charming," said Charlotte Stant. "If he weren't I shouldn't mind." "No more should I!" her friend harmoniously returned. "Ah, but you DON'T mind. You don't have to. You don't have to, I mean, as I have. It's the last folly ever to care, in an anxious way, the least particle more than one is absolutely forced.
Meanwhile the months passed, the proofs of "Mortimer Stant" had been corrected and the book was about to appear. To Peter now everything seemed to hang upon this event. It became with him, during the weeks before its appearance, a monomania. If this book were a success why then dare and Mrs. Rossiter and all of them would come round to him.
Jacques Falleix had spoken to him about this house, which was worth sixty thousand francs at most, and he wished to be put in possession of it at once, so as to avail himself of the privileges of the householder. The cashier, honest man, came to inquire whether his master had lost anything by Falleix's bankruptcy. "On de contrar' mein goot Volfgang, I stant to vin ein hundert tousant francs."
They presently thereafter left the house together and drew out half-an-hour on the terrace in a manner they were to revert to in thought, later on, as that of persons who really had been taking leave of each other at a parting of the ways. He traced his impression, on coming to consider, back to a mere three words she had begun by using about Charlotte Stant.
and not think of the stately tenderness of Virgil's Stant et oves circum; nostri nee poenitet illas and the flocks of Arcady that gather round in sympathy with the lovelorn Gallus' woe? So again the well-known lines Not seldom, clad in radiant vest, Deceitfully goes forth the Morn; Not seldom Evening in the west Sinks smilingly forsworn,
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