“Oh, they’re just as bad!” Stanwell jeered.
“You’ve sold your talent, and you know it: that’s the dreadful part. You did it deliberately,” she cried with passion.
“Oh, deliberately,” he interjected.
“And you’re not ashamed—you talk of going on.”
“I’m not ashamed; I talk of going on.”
She received this with a long shuddering sigh, and turned her eyes away from him.
“Oh, why—why—why?” she lamented.
It was on the tip of Stanwell’s tongue to answer, “That I might say to you what I am just saying now—” but he replied instead: “A man may paint bad pictures and be a decent fellow. Look at Mungold, after all!”
The adjuration had an unexpected effect. Kate’s colour faded suddenly, and she sat motionless, with a stricken face.
“There’s a difference—” she began at length abruptly; “the difference you’ve always insisted on. Mr. Mungold paints as well as he can. He has no idea that his pictures are—less good than they might be.”
“Well—?”
“So he can’t be accused of doing what he does for money—of sacrificing anything better.” She turned on him with troubled eyes. “It was you who made me understand that, when Caspar used to make fun of him.”
Stanwell smiled. “I’m glad you still think me a better painter than Mungold. But isn’t it hard that for that very reason I should starve in a hole? If I painted badly enough you’d see no objection to my living at the Waldorf!”
“Ah, don’t joke about it,” she murmured. “Don’t triumph in it.”
“I see no reason to at present,” said Stanwell drily. “But I won’t pretend to be ashamed when I’m not. I think there are occasions when a man is justified in doing what I’ve done.”
She looked at him solemnly. “What occasions?”
“Why, when he wants money, hang it!”
She drew a deep breath. “Money—money? Has Caspar’s example been nothing to you, then?”
“It hasn’t proved to me that I must starve while Mungold lives on truffles!”
Again her face changed and she stirred uneasily, and then rose to her feet.
“There is no occasion which can justify an artist’s sacrificing his convictions!” she exclaimed.
Stanwell rose too, facing her with a mounting urgency which sent a flush to his cheek.
“Can’t you conceive such an occasion in my case? The wish, I mean, to make things easier for Caspar—to help you in any way you might let me?”
Her face reflected his blush, and she stood gazing at him with a wounded wonder.
“Caspar and I—you imagine we could live on money earned in
Stanwell made an impatient gesture. “You’ve got to live on something—or he has, even if you don’t include yourself!”
Her blush deepened miserably, but she held her head high.
“That’s just it—that’s what I came here to say to you.” She stood a moment gazing away from him at the lake.
He looked at her in surprise. “You came here to say something to me?”
“Yes. That we’ve got to live on something, Caspar and I, as you say; and since an artist cannot sacrifice his convictions, the sacrifice must—I mean—I wanted you to know that I have promised to marry Mr. Mungold.”
“Mungold!” Stanwell cried with a sharp note of irony; but her white look checked it on his lips.
“I know all you are going to say,” she murmured, with a kind of nobleness which moved him even through his sense of its grotesqueness. “But you must see the distinction, because you first made it clear to me. I can take money earned in good faith—I can let Caspar live on it. I can marry Mr. Mungold; because, though his pictures are bad, he does not prostitute his art.”
She began to move away from him slowly, and he followed her in silence along the frozen path.
When Stanwell re-entered his studio the dusk had fallen. He lit his lamp and rummaged out some writing- materials. Having found them, he wrote to Shepson to say that he could not paint Mrs. Van Orley, and did not care to accept any more orders for the present. He sealed and stamped the letter and flung it over the banisters for the janitor to post; then he dragged out his unfinished head of Kate Arran, replaced it on the easel, and sat down before it with a grim smile.
THE BEST MAN
I
DUSK had fallen, and the circle of light shed by the lamp of Governor Mornway’s writing-table just rescued from the surrounding dimness his own imposing bulk, thrown back in a deep chair in the lounging attitude habitual to him at that hour.
When the Governor of Midsylvania rested he rested completely. Five minutes earlier he had been bowed over his office desk, an Atlas with the State on his shoulders; now, his working hours over, he had the air of a man who has spent his day in desultory pleasure, and means to end it in the enjoyment of a good dinner. This freedom from care threw into relief the hovering fidgetiness of his sister, Mrs. Nimick, who, just outside the circle of lamplight,
