He had a fine studio and a handsome suite of rooms in Fitzroy Square. Beautiful specimens of his unfinished work, endless studies, hung on his studio walls. Everything else was as nice as it could be—the furniture, the bibelots, and bric-a-brac, the artistic foreign and Eastern knickknacks and draperies and hangings and curtains and rugs—the semi-grand piano by Collard & Collard.
That immortal canvas, the Moon-Dial (just begun, and already commissioned by Moses Lyon, the famous picture-dealer), lay on his easel.
No man worked harder and with teeth more clinched than Little Billee when he was at work—none rested or played more discreetly when it was time to rest or play.
The glass on his mantelpiece was full of cards of invitation, reminders, pretty mauve and pink and lilac-scented notes; nor were coronets wanting on many of these hospitable little missives. He had quite overcome his fancied aversion for bloated dukes and lords and the rest (we all do sooner or later, if things go well with us); especially for their wives and sisters and daughters and female cousins; even their mothers and aunts. In point of fact, and in spite of his tender years, he was in some danger (for his art) of developing into that type adored by sympathetic women who haven’t got much to do: the friend, the tame cat, the platonic lover (with many loves)—the squire of dames, the trusty one, of whom husbands and brothers have no fear!—the delicate, harmless dilettante of Eros—the dainty shepherd who dwells “dans le pays du tendre!”—and stops there!
The woman flatters and the man confides—and there is no danger whatever, I’m told—and I am glad!
One man loves his fiddle (or, alas! his neighbor’s sometimes) for all the melodies he can wake from it—it is but a selfish love!
Another, who is no fiddler, may love a fiddle too; for its symmetry, its neatness, its color—its delicate grainings, the lovely lines and curves of its back and front—for its own sake, so to speak. He may have a whole galleryful of fiddles to love in this innocent way—a harem!—and yet not know a single note of music, or even care to hear one. He will dust them and stroke them, and take them down and try to put them in tune—pizzicato!—and put them back again, and call them ever such sweet little pet names: viol, viola, viola d’amore, viol di gamba, violino mio! and breathe his little troubles into them, and they will give back inaudible little murmurs in sympathetic response, like a damp Aeolian harp; but he will never draw a bow across the strings, nor wake a single chord—or discord!
And who shall say he is not wise in his generation? It is but an old-fashioned philistine notion that fiddles were only made to be played on—the fiddles themselves are beginning to resent it; and rightly, I wot!
In this harmless fashion Little Billee was friends with more than one fine lady de par le monde.
Indeed, he had been reproached by his more bohemian brothers of the brush for being something of a tuft-hunter—most unjustly. But nothing gives such keen offence to our unsuccessful brother, bohemian or bourgeois, as our sudden intimacy with the so-called great, the little lords and ladies of this little world! Not even our fame and success, and all the joy and pride they bring us, are so hard to condone—so embittering, so humiliating, to the jealous fraternal heart.
Alas! poor humanity—that the mere countenance of our betters (if they are our betters!) should be thought so priceless a boon, so consummate an achievement, so crowning a glory, as all that!
“A dirty bit of orange-peel,
The stump of a cigar—
Once trod on by a princely heel,
How beautiful they are!”
Little Billee was no tuft-hunter—he was the tuft-hunted, or had been. No one of his kind was ever more persistently, resolutely, hospitably harried than this young “hare with many friends” by people of rank and fashion.
And at first he thought them most charming; as they so often are, these graceful, gracious, gay, good-natured stoics and barbarians, whose manners are as easy and simple as their morals—but how much better!—and who, at least, have this charm, that they can wallow in untold gold (when they happen to possess it) without ever seeming to stink of the same: yes, they bear wealth gracefully—and the want of it more gracefully still! and these are pretty accomplishments that have yet to be learned by our new aristocracy of the shop and countinghouse, Jew or gentile, which is everywhere elbowing its irresistible way to the top and front of everything, both here and abroad.
Then he discovered that, much as you might be with them, you could never be of them, unless perchance you managed to hook on by marrying one of their ugly ducklings—their failures—their remnants! and even then life isn’t all beer and skittles for a rank outsider, I’m told! Then he discovered that he didn’t want to be of them in the least; especially at such a cost as that! and that to be very much with them was apt to pall, like everything else.
Also, he found that they were very mixed; good, bad, and indifferent—and not always very dainty or select in their predilections, since they took unto their bosoms such queer outsiders (just for the sake of being amused a little while) that their capricious favor ceased to be an honor and a glory—if it ever was! And, then, their fickleness!
Indeed, he found, or thought he found, that they could be just as clever, as liberal, as polite or refined—as narrow, insolent, swaggering, coarse, and vulgar—as handsome, as ugly—as graceful, as ungainly—as modest or conceited, as any other upper class of the community—and, indeed,
