Chapter 10

I have spoken of these reminiscences as of a row of coloured beads,
and I confess that as I continue to straighten out my chaplet I am
rather proud of the comparison. The beads are all there, as I
said--they slip along the string in their small smooth roundness.
Geoffrey Dawling accepted as a gentleman the event his evening
paper had proclaimed; in view of which I snatched a moment to nudge
him a hint that he might offer Mrs. Meldrum his hand. He returned
me a heavy head-shake, and I judged that marriage would henceforth
strike him very much as the traffic of the street may strike some
poor incurable at the window of an hospital. Circumstances arising
at this time led to my making an absence from England, and
circumstances already existing offered him a firm basis for similar
action. He had after all the usual resource of a Briton--he could
take to his boats, always drawn up in our background. He started
on a journey round the globe, and I was left with nothing but my
inference as to what might have happened. Later observation
however only confirmed my belief that if at any time during the
couple of months after Flora Saunt's brilliant engagement he had
made up, as they say, to the good lady of Folkestone, that good
lady would not have pushed him over the cliff. Strange as she was
to behold I knew of cases in which she had been obliged to
administer that shove. I went to New York to paint a couple of
portraits; but I found, once on the spot, that I had counted
without Chicago, where I was invited to blot out this harsh
discrimination by the production of some dozen. I spent a year in
America and should probably have spent a second had I not been
summoned back to England by alarming news from my mother. Her
strength had failed, and as soon as I reached London I hurried down
to Folkestone, arriving just at the moment to offer a welcome to
some slight symptom of a rally. She had been much worse but was
now a little better; and though I found nothing but satisfaction in
having come to her I saw after a few hours that my London studio,
where arrears of work had already met me, would be my place to
await whatever might next occur. Yet before returning to town I
called on Mrs. Meldrum, from whom I had not had a line, and my view
of whom, with the adjacent objects, as I had left them, had been
intercepted by a luxuriant foreground.

Before I had gained her house I met her, as I supposed, coming
toward me across the down, greeting me from afar with the familiar
twinkle of her great vitreous badge; and as it was late in the
autumn and the esplanade a blank I was free to acknowledge this
signal by cutting a caper on the grass. My enthusiasm dropped
indeed the next moment, for I had seen in a few more