d as he sped on the same
journey over the same rails, his imagination followed Frida Tancred
in her flight toward freedom and the unknown.

THE COSMOPOLITAN

PART II

OUTWARD BOUND

XIV

After seven weeks in England Maurice Durant began to look back with
longing on the seven years he had spent away from it, and so turned
his back on Dover and his face to the South of France. Those three
weeks in Coton Manor had disgusted him with the country, another
three weeks in London had more than satisfied his passion for town.
It was there that he realized more keenly than anywhere else that he
was a foreigner in England, and he went abroad in order to feel
himself an Englishman again.

Restless as ever, he spent two years wandering the world, then shut
himself up for three more in a little villa in the Apennines, and
worked as he had never worked before, with the result that at the
end of the five years, he found himself irresistibly drawn back to
England again. Gradually--very gradually--England was waking to the
fact that Maurice Durant was a clever painter; still more gradually
it had dawned on Maurice that he was becoming famous. His name had
traveled to London, as a name frequently does, via Paris and New
York, and Fame had lured him to London by dint of taking it up and
incessantly sounding it, not with a coarse and startling blast from
her favorite instrument, the trumpet, but with a delicate crescendo,
lyrically, subtly, insinuatingly, like a young siren performing on a
well-modulated flute. The trumpet, no doubt, would have deafened or
irritated him; but before he got sick of it the softer music was by
no means disagreeable to his ear.

It seemed that he had scored a double success, being equally happy
in his landscapes and his portraits. The critics were divided. One
evening it would appear that, within the limits of his art, Maurice
Durant was the subtlest, the finest exponent of modern womanhood;
the next morning he would be told that he had rendered the beauty of
the divine visible world more imaginatively, more individually, than
any living artist, but that as a portrait painter he had yet to find
himself. These were the variations on the one familiar theme; for as
to his modernity, which was obvious, they were all agreed. But at
last he came across an account of himself which he acknowledged to
be more or less consistent and correct. It was the final
appreciation, the summing up of a judge who w