. St. Augustine never pretended that earthly happiness
was a delusion. He knew better. He said, 'Do not trust it, but seek the
happiness which hath no end.' Personally, I can accept with gratitude as
much as I can get. 'Is not the life of men upon earth all trial, without
any interval?' This may be; yet it is something to learn how to
sympathise with happiness. Our best men and women devote themselves too
exclusively to the diagnosis of misery."

"You have thought a lot, I can see," said Reckage.

The artist gave him a quick, friendly glance.

"I have played the fool," said he. "I envy Orange. He will know things
that I can never know--now. I haven't lived up to my thoughts. I am not
remorseful--I don't believe in remorse. It is a thing for the
half-hearted. But if I am not sad, I am not especially gay. The middle
course between sentimentality and gallantry seems to me intimately
immoral and ridiculous into the bargain. So I am an idealist with
senses. There are times when I hate life. And why? Because life is evil?
By no means; but because we tell lies about it, and write lies about it,
from morning till night."

"You seem a bit depressed," said Lord Reckage. "But, by the by, how is
the portrait going? My brother Hercy, who paints a little, always
declared that Agnes was unpaintable. Do you find her unpaintable?"

"No," said Rennes; "oh no!"

CHAPTER VII

When Reckage asked Rennes whether he found Miss Carillon "unpaintable,"
the artist was conscious of a swift, piercing emotion, which passed,
indeed, but left an ache. And as the day advanced the smart of the wound
grew more intense. A visit to the National Gallery, a call at his
tailor's, an inspection of maps at his club, afforded little relief to
the indefinable misery. He was tortured by the disingenuousness of his
own mind. He had done so much, and thought so much, and read so much; he
could give so many scientific reasons for each idea and each movement of
his mental and physical being, that the joy of life had been cut up in
its machinery. He had lost the power of being natural either in his
pains or his pleasures. He knew all the answers, but not one of the
questions which trouble youth. He had never wondered at anything.
Wonder--the lovely mistress of wisdom--had taught him none of her
secrets. Dead certainty had dogged his steps from his first appearance
on this unknowable world. Once, when a very little boy, he admired a
vase full of pink ros