re understanding breeds a
strong sense of obligation. Mrs. Mansfield felt as if she had duties
toward Heath. During the two weeks which elapsed before Charmian's
return from Algiers she thought more about his future than about her
child's. But she was a very feminine woman and, to her, a man's future
always seemed to matter more than a woman's.

Heath, too, had his great talent. That might need protection in the
future. Mrs. Mansfield did not believe in an untroubled life for such a
man as Heath. There was something disturbing both in his personality and
in his music which seemed to her to preclude the possibility of his
dwelling always in peace. But she hoped he would be true to his
instinct, to the strange instinct which kept him now in a sort of
cloistered seclusion. She knew he had friends, acquaintances, made
during his time at the College of Music, through the introductions he
had brought to London from Cornwall, through family connections. Human
intercourse must be part of every life. But she was glad, very glad,
that neither Mrs. Shiffney nor Max Elliot had persuaded him into the
world where artists are handed on and on till they "know everybody." His
words: "Do you know why some men enter the cloister? It's because they
feel that if they are not monks they will be libertines," remained with
her. Doubtless Heath knew himself. She thought of those who have pursued
their art through wildness--Heath's expression--with an inflexibility
quite marvellous, an order in the midst of disorder, which to the
onlooker seems no less than a miracle. But they were surely Bohemians
born, and full of characteristics that were racial. Such characteristics
did not exist in Heath, she thought. She pondered. He was surely not a
Bohemian. And yet he did not belong to the other race so noticeable in
England, the race of the cultured talented, who live well-ordered lives
in the calm light of a mild and unobjectionable publicity, who produce
in the midst of comfort, giving birth to nothing on straw, who are sane
even to the extent of thinking very much as the man in Sloane Street
thinks, who occasionally go to a levee, and have set foot on summer days
in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Heath, perhaps, could not be dubbed
with a name. Was he a Bohemian who, for his health's sake, could not
live in Bohemia? She remembered the crucifix standing in front of the
piano where he passed so many hours, the strange and terrible words he
had chos