away into the valley, where he sits all day in a gorse-bush, trying to put the tumbling of the stream on paper. The drought has dried it up a good bit, but never was anything so desiccated as the arid little plan of it he produces with pride for me to see, painted with a brush with three hairs in it—peck, peck, scratch and dab—like a canary scrabbling for seed. Why don’t I take the opportunity to do some work in this glorious place? No, thanks; I’m a figure and portrait wallah—besides, I’ve come here for a rest. It is not mine to sing the stately grace—I smoke my pipe in the doorway, drive the cattle out of the back garden, and see that the stewpot doesn’t boil too fast.
“So here I am, in comfortable exile with Menelaus, while Helen sits at home and sews shirts. And it’s a better way, too. One mustn’t take these things too seriously. Damned if Harrison hasn’t got the right idea after all. Look after the grub and leave women to their own fool devices. They give a man no peace. You, being married, have perhaps got your house in order. Do you find it as easy to do your work, now that you’re hooked up to a whirlwind? But, of course, your whirlwind works too, and helps to turn the mill-wheel, which no doubt makes all the difference.”
Lathom went on in this strain for a page or so. Cynicism from him was something new, and I took it to spell restlessness of some sort or other. Either, I thought, he was getting fed up with the lady’s exactions, or the trio had arrived at a modus vivendi. It was no affair of mine.
He ended up by saying that he would be running up to town in a day or two and would look me up. I was then living in Bloomsbury—in fact, in my present house—and my wife was away with her people. I had arranged to go with her, but at the last moment an urgent matter turned up—an Introduction to an anthology, which had to be rushed out in a great hurry before some other publisher get hold of the idea, and I had to stay behind to get the thing fairly going, as it meant a good deal of work at the British Museum.