nob with Russian Counts, Persian Ministers, and German Barons. That was
not to my taste, save as a kind of dramatic entertainment to be indulged
in at intervals like a Drury Lane pantomime. But though I had no proof
that such was the case, I knew Luke Freeman's malady to be a woman. I
taxed him with it. He did not deny it. He was painting at the time, I
remember, and he testily and unprofitably drew his brush across the face
of a Copt woman he was working at, and bit off the end of a cigar. I
asked him if it was another man's wife; he promptly said no. I asked him
if there were any awkward complications any inconsiderate pressure from
the girl's parents of brothers; and he promptly told me to be damned.
I told him I thought he ought to know that an ambitious man might as well
drown himself at once as get a fast woman in his path. Then he showed a
faculty for temper and profanity that stunned me. But the up shot was
that I found the case straight enough to all appearances. The woman was
a foreigner and not easy to win; was beautiful, had a fine voice, loved
admiration, and possessed a scamp of a brother who, wanted her to marry
a foreigner, so that, according to her father's will, a large portion of
her fortune would come to him.... Were you going to speak? No? Very
well. Things got worse and worse. Freeman neglected business and
everything else, became a nuisance. He never offered to take me to see
the lady, and I did not suggest it, did not even know where she lived.
What galled me most in the matter was that Freeman had been for years
attentive to a cousin of mine, Clare Hazard, almost my sister, indeed,
since she had been brought up in my father's house; and I knew that from
a child she had adored him. However, these things seldom work out
according to the law of Nature, and so I chewed the cud of
dissatisfaction and kept the thing from my cousin as long as I could.
About the time matters seemed at a crisis I was taken ill, and was
ordered south. My mother and Freeman accompanied me as far as Paris.
Here Freeman left me to return to England, and in the Cafe Voisin, at