I don’t mind his painting. It gives him something to do and keeps him out of mischief. He has a studio down in Washington Square, and is perfectly happy messing about there all day.
Everything would be fine if he didn’t think it necessary to tack on the artistic temperament to his painting. He’s developed the idea that he has nerves, and everything upsets them.
Things came to a head this morning at breakfast. Clarence, my snake, has the cutest way of climbing up the leg of the table and looking at you pleadingly in the hope that you will give him soft-boiled egg, which he adores. He did it this morning, and no sooner had his head appeared above the table than Algie, with a kind of sharp wail, struck him a violent blow on the nose with a teaspoon. Then he turned to me, very pale, and said: “Pauline, this must end! The time has come to speak up. A nervous, highly strung man like myself should not and must not be called upon to live in a house where he is constantly meeting snakes and monkeys without warning. Choose between me and—”
We had got as far as this when Eustace, the monkey, who I didn’t know was in the room at all, suddenly sprang upon his back. He is very fond of Algie.
Would you believe it? Algie walked straight out of the house, still holding the teaspoon, and has not returned. Later in the day he called me up on the phone and said that, though he realized that a man’s place was the home, he declined to cross the threshold again until I had got rid of Eustace and Clarence. I tried to reason with him. I told him that he ought to think himself lucky it wasn’t anything worse than a monkey and a snake, for the last person Roscoe Sherriff handled, an emotional actress named Devenish, had to keep a young puma. But he wouldn’t listen, and the end of it was that he rang off and I have not seen or heard of him since.
I am brokenhearted. I won’t give in, but I am having an awful time. So, dearest Claire, do come over and help me. If you could possibly sail by the Atlantic, leaving Southampton on the twenty-fourth of this month, you would meet a friend of mine whom I think you would like. His name is Dudley Pickering, and he made a fortune in automobiles. I expect you have heard of the Pickering automobiles?
Darling Claire, do come, or I know I shall weaken and yield to Algie’s outrageous demands; for, though I would like to hit him with a brick, I love him dearly.
Claire sank back against the cushioned seat and her eyes filled with tears of disappointment. Of all the things which would have chimed in with her discontented mood at that moment a sudden flight to America was the most alluring. Only one consideration held her back—she had not the money for her fare.
Polly might have thought of that, she reflected hitterly. She took the letter up again and saw that on the last page there was a postscript:
P.S. I don’t know how you are fixed for money, old girl, but if things are the same with you as in the old days you can’t be rolling. So I have paid for a passage for you with the liner people this side, and they have cabled their English office, you can sail whenever you want to. Come right over.
An hour later the manager of the Southampton branch of the White Star line was dazzled by an apparition, a beautiful girl who burst in upon him with flushed face and shining eyes, demanding a berth on the steamship Atlantic and talking about a Lady Wetherby. Ten minutes later, her passage secured, Claire was walking to the local theater to inform those in charge of the destinies of The Girl and the Artist number one company that they must look elsewhere for a substitute for Miss Claudia Winslow. Then she went back to her hotel to write a letter home, notifying her mother of her plans.
She looked at her watch. It was six o’clock. Back in West Kensington a rich smell of dinner would be floating through the flat; the cook, watching the boiling cabbage, would be singing “A Few More Years Shall Roll”; her mother would be sighing; and her little brother Percy would be employed upon some juvenile deviltry, the exact nature of which it was not possible to conjecture, though one could be certain that it would be something involving a deafening noise.
Claire smiled a happy smile.
IV
The offices of Messrs. Nichols, Nichols, Nichols and Nichols were in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They were small and dingy, so small that new clients were apt to wonder how on earth there was room in them for so many Nicholses. They pictured a sort of Black Hole of Calcutta in which Nichols fought with Nichols for air.
The congestion was not quite so bad as that. The first Nichols had been dead since the reign of King William the Fourth, the second since the jubilee year of Queen Victoria. The remaining brace were Lord Dawlish’s friend Jerry and his father, a formidable old man who knew all the shady secrets of all the noble families in England.
Bill walked up the stairs and was shown into the room where Jerry, when his father’s eye was upon him, gave his daily
