Chapter 24

CHAPTER XXIV.

It was noon. Denis, descending from his chamber, where he had
been making an unsuccessful effort to write something about
nothing in particular, found the drawing-room deserted. He was
about to go out into the garden when his eye fell on a familiar
but mysterious object--the large red notebook in which he had so
often seen Jenny quietly and busily scribbling. She had left it
lying on the window-seat. The temptation was great. He picked
up the book and slipped off the elastic band that kept it
discreetly closed.

"Private. Not to be opened," was written in capital letters on
the cover. He raised his eyebrows. It was the sort of thing one
wrote in one's Latin Grammar while one was still at one's
preparatory school.

"Black is the raven, black is the rook,
But blacker the theif who steals this book!"

It was curiously childish, he thought, and he smiled to himself.
He opened the book. What he saw made him wince as though he had
been struck.

Denis was his own severest critic; so, at least, he had always
believed. He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector
probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul; he was
Brown Dog to himself. His weaknesses, his absurdities--no one
knew them better than he did. Indeed, in a vague way he imagined
that nobody beside himself was aware of them at all. It seemed,
somehow, inconceivable that he should appear to other people as
they appeared to him; inconceivable that they ever spoke of him
among themselves in that same freely critical and, to be quite
honest, mildly malicious tone in which he was accustomed to talk
of them. In his own eyes he had defects, but to see them was a
privilege reserved to him alone. For the rest of the world he
was surely an image of flawless crystal. It was almost
axiomatic.

On opening the red notebook that crystal image of himself crashed
to the ground, and was irreparably shattered. He was not his own
severest critic after all. The discovery was a painful one.

The fruit of Jenny's unobtrusive scribbling lay before him. A
caricature of himself, reading (the book was upside-down). In
the background a dancing couple, recognisable as Gombauld and
Anne. Beneath, the legend: "Fable of the Wallflower and the
Sour Grapes." Fascinated and horrified, Denis pored over the
drawing. It was masterful. A mute, inglorious Rouveyre appeared
in every one of those cruelly clear lines. The expression of the
face, an assumed aloofness and superiority tempered by a feeble
envy; the attitude of the body and limbs, an attitude of studious
and scholarly dignity, given away by the fidgety pose of the
turned-in feet--these things were terrible. And, more terrible
still, was