It
was all very fine for Larry, ran the illegible scrawl, to talk of
selling at such a price, but he ought to see what a hole his doing so
put his neighbours in! Larry hadn't a squad of incumbrances, and
charges, and mortgages, hung round his neck like leeches (and no fault
of the Major's). He had had to find money in a hurry to pay off one of
these cursed things only the other day, and if he hadn't had the luck
to mention it to a friend, who was kind enough to come to the rescue
(of course on good security) the Major would have been in a hat, or a
hole, Larry couldn't quite read which.
These grievances, and much more, illegibly scrawled on foreign paper,
with a quill pen. Larry, swallowed up in the absorbing, isolating life
of a Paris studio, would put the letters half-read, in his pocket, and
would immediately forget all about them. After all, he couldn't
interfere with Barty; he was the man at the helm, and mustn't be
talked to. Also it was idiotic to keep a dog and bark yourself.
Proverbial philosophy is a recognised sedative; Larry gave himself a
dose or two, and straightway forgot Cousin Dick, forgot Ireland,
forgot even that gratifying nomination of himself as Nationalist
candidate for the Division, and plunged back into the burning
atmosphere of art, wherein models and professors, cliques and cabals,
glow, and seethe, and exist intensely, and with as little reference to
the affairs of the outside world, as if they were the sole occupants
of a distant and much over-heated star.
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