«he would soon pay his debt to me,» but that wasn't what I wanted. I felt that I had got off the right road because of him and was angry with myself for having wasted my substance in profligate living, and worst of all, in silly luxury and brainless showing off. I declared I was ill and was going to England at once. I must make a new start and accumulate some more money, and a few mornings later I bade Bancroft good-bye and crossed the channel and went on to my sister and father in Tenby, arriving there in a severe shivering fit with a bad headache and every symptom of ague, I was indeed ill and played out. I had taken double doses of life and literature, had swallowed all the chief French writers from Rabelais and Montaigne to Flaubert, Zola and Balzac, passing by Pascal and Vauvenargues, Renan and Hugo-a glutton's feast for six months. Then, too, I had nosed out this artist's studio and that, had spent hours watching Rodin at work and more hours comparing this painter's model with that, these breasts and hips with those. My love of plastic beauty nearly brought me to grief at least once, and perhaps I had better record the incident, though it rather hurt my vanity at the time. One day I called at Manet's old studio, which was rented now by an American painter named Alexander. He had real power as a craftsman, but only a moderate brain and was always trying by beauty or something remarkable in his model to make up for his own want of originality. On this visit I noticed an extraordinary sketch of a young girl standing where childhood and womanhood meet: she had cut her hair short and her chestnut-dark eyes lent her a startling distinction. «You like it?» asked Alexander.
«She has the most perfect figure I have ever seen.» «I like it,»
I replied. «I wonder whether the magic is in the model or in your brush?» «You'll soon see,» he retorted, a little piqued. «She's due here already,» and almost as he spoke, she came in with quick, alert steps. She was below medium height, but evidently already a woman. Without a word she went behind the screen to undress, when Alexander said, «Well?» I had to think a moment or two before answering. «God and you have conspired together!» I exclaimed, and indeed his brush had surpassed itself. He had caught and rendered a childish innocence in expression that I had not remarked, and he had blocked in the features with superb brio. «It is your best work to date,» I went on, «and almost anyone would have signed it.» At this moment the model emerged with a sheet about her, and probably because of my praise, Alexander introduced me to Mile. Jeanne and said I was a distinguished American writer. She nodded to me saucily, flashing white teeth at me, mounted the estrade, threw off the sheet and took up her pose-all in a moment. I was carried off my feet; the more I looked, the more perfections I discovered. Needless to say, I told her so in my best French, with a hundred similes. Alexander also I conciliated by begging him to do no more to the sketch but sell it to me and do another. Finally he took four hundred and fifty francs for it and in an hour had made another sketch. My purchase had convinced Mile. Jeanne that I was a young millionaire, and when I asked her if I might accompany her to her home, she consented more than readily. As a matter of fact, I took her for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne and from there to dinner in a private room at the Cafe Anglais. During the meal I had got to like her: she lived with her mother, Alexander had told me; though by no means prudish, still less virginal, she was not a coureuse. I thought I might risk connection; but when I got her to take off her clothes and began to caress her sex, she drew away and said quite as a matter of course: «Why not faire minette?» When I asked her what she meant, she told me frankly: «We women do not get excited in a moment as you men do; why not kiss me and tongue me there for a few minutes, then I shall have enjoyed myself and shall be ready.» I'm afraid I made rather a face, for she remarked coolly: «Just as you like, you know. I prefer in a meal the hors-d'oeuvres to the piece de resistance like a good many other women: indeed, I often content myself with the hors-d'oeuvres and don't take any more. Surely you understand that a woman goes on getting more and more excited for an hour or two and no man is capable of bringing her to the highest pitch of enjoyment while pleasing himself.» «I'm able,» I said stubbornly. «I can go on all night if you please me, so we should skip appetizers.» «No, no!» she replied, laughing, «let us have a banquet then, but begin with the lips and tongue!» The delay, the bandying to and fro of argument, and above all the idea of kissing and tonguing her sex, had brought me to coolness and reason. Was I not just as foolish as Bancroft if I yielded to her-an unknown girl? I replied finally,
«No, little lady, your charms are not for me,» and I took my seat again at the table and poured myself out some wine. I had the ordinary English or American youth's repugnance to what seemed like degradation, never guessing that Jeanne was giving me the second lesson m the noble art of seduction, of which my sister had taught me long ago the rudiments. The next time I was offered minette I had grown wiser and made no scruples, but that's another story. The fact is that my first visit to Paris I kept perfectly chaste, thanks in part to the example of Ned's blunder; thinks, too, to my dislike of going with any girl sexually whom I didn't really care for, and I didn't care for Jeanne. She was too imperious, and imperiousness in a girl is the quality I most dislike, perhaps because I suffer from an overdose of the humor. At any rate, it was not sexual indulgence that broke my health in Paris, but my passionate desire to learn that had cut down my hours of sleep and exasperated my nerves. I took cold and had a dreadful recurrence of malaria. I wanted rest and time to breathe and think. The little house in a side street in the lovely Welsh watering-place was exactly the haven of rest I needed. I soon got well and strong and for the first time learned to know my father. He came for long walks with me, though he was over sixty.
After his terrible accident seven years before (he slipped and fell thirty feet into a drydock while his ship was being repaired), one side of his hair and moustache had turned white and the other remained jet-black. I was astonished first by his vigor: he thought nothing of a ten mile walk, and on one of our excursions I asked him why he had not given me the nomination I wanted as a midshipman. He was curiously silent and waved the subject aside with, «The Navy for you?
No!» and he shook his head. A few days afterwards, however, he came back to the subject of his own accord. «You asked me,» he began,
«why I didn't send you the nomination for the midshipman's examination. Now I'll tell you. To get on in the British Navy and make a career in it, you should either be well-born or well-off: you were neither. For a youth without position or money, there are only two possible roads up: servility or silence, and you were incapable of both.» «Oh, Governor, how true and how wise of you,» I cried,
«but why, why didn't you tell me? I'd have understood then as well as now and thought the more of you for thwarting me.» «You forget,» he went on, «that I had trained myself in the other road of silence: it is difficult for me even now to express myself.» And he went on with bitterness in voice and accent, «They drove me to silence: if you knew what I endured before I got my first step as lieutenant. If it hadn't been that I was determined' to marry your mother, I could never have swallowed the countless humiliations of my brainless superiors!
What would have happened to you I saw as in a glass. You were extraordinarily quick, impulsive and high-tempered. Don't you know that brains and energy and will power are hated by all the wastrels, and in this world they are everywhere in the vast majority. Some lieutenant or captain would have taken an instantaneous dislike to you that would have grown on every manifestation of your superiority: he would have laid traps for you of insubordination and insolence, probably for months, and then in some port where he was powerful, he would have brought you before a court martial and you would have been dismissed from the Navy in disgrace, and perhaps your whole life ruined. The British Navy is the worst place in the world for genius.»