set up
housekeeping together.

For a time this was great, with its twang of Rue Monsieur le Prince and
Murger and the old Bohemia, and Paul was convinced that he had done a
noble thing in not deserting the little woman. In a flaccid sort of a
way she seemed to love him, and in that respect, since his own mind was
by no means urgent, he was satisfied. He was faithful to the tie, and
flaunted his own magnanimity.

But his true mistress was his work, and this he loved with an increasing
ardour. How devotedly he laboured he never knew until long afterwards,
when what had once been a passion of delight and a necessity of nature
degenerated into a stale drudgery practised for the sake of mere money.
But, oh! the sweetness of brain-toil whilst the heart was fresh and
whilst it still seemed worth while to preach some kind of gospel to
mankind! To pace the streets and read the faces of people as they
went by, to weave a thousand stories in a day around the destinies of
strangers, to sit far into the night fed with rich and glowing fancies,
to express them with conscious power, to work with living vigour for the
love of work alone!

These were rich days, and if the domestic intercourse were
poverty-stricken there was the bachelor intercourse at the clubs to make
up for it, and even amongst his married friends Annette was an ignorable
quantity unless he took to waving her like a flag of virtue.

There was Fortescue, a man of medium fame, but of real genius, whose
delightful home was always open to him. Mrs. Fortescue probably knew all
about Paul's eccentric menage, but she had been an opera-singer in her
day, had known a good many open secrets of the kind, and was a woman of
the world. It was not her business to pry into that kind of secret, and
she liked the young fellow for many reasons. Considering what a fool
he was, he had grown to an astonishing charm of manner. The lonely man
smoking his idle pipe at his tent door in the canon looked back at him
across such a distance of time and fate that his inspection of the youth
was almost impersonal. The lad passed for a piece of naive nature,
and not altogether unjustly. He was eager and ardent, and absurdly
tender-hearted. He loved all his friends, and he had a crowd of them.
'Because,' as Balzac says, 'he had known a time when a sou'sworth of
fried potatoes would have been a luxury,' he threw about his money with
a lordly liberality. A simple ballad, if sung with any approach t