esources.

"Money's only excuse is to put beauty into circulation," was one of
the axioms he laid down across the Sevres and silver of an exquisitely
appointed luncheon-table, when, on a later day, I had again run over
from Monte Carlo; and Mrs. Gisburn, beaming on him, added for my
enlightenment: "Jack is so morbidly sensitive to every form of beauty."

Poor Jack! It had always been his fate to have women say such things of
him: the fact should be set down in extenuation. What struck me now
was that, for the first time, he resented the tone. I had seen him, so
often, basking under similar tributes--was it the conjugal note that
robbed them of their savour? No--for, oddly enough, it became apparent
that he was fond of Mrs. Gisburn--fond enough not to see her absurdity.
It was his own absurdity he seemed to be wincing under--his own attitude
as an object for garlands and incense.

"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff about
me--they say it about Victor Grindle," was his only protest, as he rose
from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.

I glanced after him, struck by his last word. Victor Grindle was, in
fact, becoming the man of the moment--as Jack himself, one might put it,
had been the man of the hour. The younger artist was said to have formed
himself at my friend's feet, and I wondered if a tinge of jealousy
underlay the latter's mysterious abdication. But no--for it was not
till after that event that the rose Dubarry drawing-rooms had begun to
display their "Grindles."

I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar to
her spaniel in the dining-room.

"Why HAS he chucked painting?" I asked abruptly.

She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.

"Oh, he doesn't HAVE to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy himself,"
she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its famille-verte
vases repeating the tones of the pale damask curtains, and its
eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded frames.

"Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in the
house."

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open countenance.
"It's his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says they're not fit to have
about; he's sent them all away except one--my portrait--and that I have
to keep upstairs."

His ridiculous modesty--Jack's modesty about his pictures? My curiosity
was growing like t