The long autumn months rolled on, bringing little new to Clytie or to Kent. Clytie continued to paint her small genre pictures, but with a more certain touch, a restraint which a deeper insight into life compelled. They did not satisfy her now, however, as they used to. She had more articulate longings after an art which should be higher, more comprehensive, more responsive to certain subtler and at the same time more stirring impulses within her.

“I want to paint something that may live,” she said to Kent, “something I can throw my whole soul into, something I can look at when it is finished and say: 'There, that is final; that expresses consummately everything I have ever felt and dreamed.'”

“If you can ever say that, you will cease to be an artist,” he replied in his matter-of-fact way.

“Perhaps so. But I must try. And the subject, the subject?”

“Wait,” said Kent. “If it ever comes, it will do so of itself.”

Clytie waited, but the subject did not come. Meanwhile she had her hands full with orders, both for pictures and for magazine illustrations. Her life was full, as far as work could make it. Winifred came regularly to the studio, as usual, cheering her with sweet companionship. She had spent her summer holiday at the seaside, treating out of her own purse her two little brothers to a holiday. She came back with glowing reminiscences of her adventures, the humorous naughtinesses of the children, the odds and ends of character she had met with. Her only regret was that her dear Clytie had not been there too.

“I should have thrown those horrid children, Reggie and Arthur, into the sea!” exclaimed Clytie.

“Oh, no, you wouldn't. They simply adore you. They are nice children, aren't they, now?”

“You little goose!” cried Clytie, kissing the warm brown cheek. “They are like you, the sweetest little children in the world. When are they coming to tea?”

These teas in the studio were red-letter days for Winifred's brothers and sisters. They worshipped Clytie, who had keen sympathy with the unconventionalities of childhood. She made grotesque caricatures of them, at which they screamed with laughter, or sat on the hearthrug with them and talked the nonsense that bright children love. Their joy was complete if Kent came in. They called him “Kent,” took complete possession of him, presented him to Clytie as a pet trifle they carried about with them. He, too, was fond of these debauches, and seldom missed attending them if he could leave the Museum in time. He loved to see Clytie take her part in them. She seemed to him even more sweet and womanly than Winifred when she had a child on her lap, and her dark red hair was touching the black ruffled curls. He told her so one day, and the colour came into her cheeks as she laughed.

Another occasional visitor in the studio was Treherne, the young clergyman whom Clytie had met at the Farquharson's numismatic dinner-party. Kent and herself had run across him at a Bond Street gallery where some paintings by the impressionists Degas and Monet were on view. He was looking ill and overworked. He replied to their inquiries that he had been forced to give up his North London parish and take lighter duties near Victoria. As he lived in her neighbourhood, he hoped that Clytie would allow him to call one day and see her pictures; “Jack” at the exhibition had aroused his admiration. Clytie readily gave him her “day,” when Miss Marchpane and herself were at home to their friends, and hoped he would come. He called, found a certain charm in the bright talk of the studio, exhilarating after the dull rounds among his parishioners, and soon became a constant visitor. Perhaps the charm of a pair of soft brown eyes attracted him more than he thought of confessing. Towards the end of the year, however, he bought, through a dealer, two of Winifred's dainty pictures.

The days shortened, the painting light grew less and less, and the time came for Clytie to pay her Christmas visit to Durdleham. She had not been there for a year, and her heart longed at times for the familiar faces and the voices of her own kith and kin. She thought that, perhaps, now she had grown older, her father and sisters would think her mode of life less unnatural, less likely to result in moral shipwreck. The letters, too, she had been receiving from them lately were kinder, more affectionate in tone. Mrs. Blather longed to have her dear Clytie back amongst them once more, and Janet wrote touchingly of the vacant chair at the dinner table. Clytie anticipated much quiet pleasure from her visit. The need of an attitude of rebellion was past, and she could throw herself lovingly, with no fear of compromising her independence, into all the mild interests of the household. There were times when a tenderer, softer chord vibrated in her heart, suggesting sadly the sweetness of home and loved family ties. She was human, with the foolish human craving for things that are not. She could not abandon her free artistic life; but if she could fill it with gentler, softer graces! In these moods she clung to Winifred, loving her for this element of sweet womanliness she brought into the rooms in the King's Road that were her home. It was with this range of feelings uppermost in her heart that she went to Durdleham.

For the first few days after Clytie's departure Kent laboured honestly and doggedly in his old way. But gradually he began to feel a lack of interest in his pursuits, to be vaguely conscious that the conditions of things were upset, and then he wished that Clytie had not gone.

One evening he was sitting in his room with a litter of proof-sheets lying idly before him. He felt depressed. It was a new sensation. It puzzled him, annoyed him, made him angry with himself, like a man's first unsuspected attack of the gout. He rose and walked about. His fire had nearly gone out, his lamp had been flaring and the room was filled with its acrid smoke. He could not open the window, for the sleet and rain were beating against the panes. He stopped for a moment watching the water dribble outside down the glass. Then he turned away impatiently, seeking solace from his book-backs and pictures. But they seemed to look back upon him unsympathetically, as if reproaching him for the bare floor, the untidy dresser, and the cheerless hearth. He rekindled his fire, filled a pipe, and sat down to think.

Kent was not given to introspection. His external interests in life were too engrossing for him to think deeply or continuously about himself. Such a habit of mind he used vehemently to deprecate as morbid, egotistical. But now this strange depression, this vague sense of loss, compelled him to account for it to his reason. He began in a sober, materialistic way to review his general health (there are philosophers amongst us who refer all moods to the liver, not looking upon it, however, like the ancients, as the seat of the affections!), to question some little disappointments he had had with regard to his great work, and to dwell upon the futility of existence—the suggestion of which he should have been logical enough to see was the result and not the cause of his state of mind. But he was not logical. Few men are when the great facts of inner life are in question; for in the course of logic “none of us would see salvation,” as far as this world's happiness is concerned. Gradually a truth dawned upon him. He missed the ever-ready companionship he had enjoyed for nearly a year. He missed Clytie. He found that for the first time in his life since he was a baby he had been depending for something on a woman. He had never realised until then the strength of that unknown subtle influence, the withdrawal of which left him so weak, so unable to put forth all his powers. At first he thought that it was merely the abrupt interruption of pleasant habits, the sudden jerk out of a well-oiled groove. Telling himself he was satisfied with this solution, he resolutely went back to his writing and began to correct his proof-sheets. But gradually his attention wandered again. These sudden impulses to work against the grain soon spend themselves out and produce greater lassitude than before.

He tossed down his pencil in disgust and swung round towards the fire. It was Clytie herself, then, that he missed. He missed her in spite of her being a woman, he told himself. And yet the picture rose before his mind of Clytie's dainty room and Clytie sitting there opposite to him, her hand, with falling lace at wrist, pressed into the softness of her hair. Why had she not written a line to him?

Yes, he missed her. But why should that make his work distasteful? He was puzzled. One thing alone was clear, his loneliness was growing intolerable. He threw on his waterproof, and, leaving his work, trudged through the rain to the “monastery,” at South Kensington.

Wither was alone. Fairfax and Greene were dining out. The little man had been too lazy and sybaritic to face the cold and wet outside. He had clad himself in pyjamas and dressing-gown, and was reading a French novel on the couch drawn up in front of the fire. His diminutive figure looked absurdly small and wizened in his loose wrap. He nodded affectionately at Kent, explained briefly the fact of his being alone, and, while Kent was hunting in a familiar corner for the pair of slippers always there in readiness for his use, went on with his reading.

“Get me some whiskey, old chap,” he said without looking up. “I have been dying for some this last hour and I have been too lazy to stir off the sofa.”

Kent, as usual, supplied Wither's wants and poured out a glass for himself.

“Lazy little beggar,” he said kindly as he sat down in the great saddle-bag chair. “How do you manage to get through your work?”

Wither laughed.

“I thought you knew better than to ask me that.”

It was a tradition in the “monastery” that Wither never did any work. They paid him at his office for lending it a gentlemanly tone. As a matter of fact, like most clever, lazy men, he generally did an ordinary man's day's work in a few hours.

He stretched himself out luxuriously and lit a cigarette.

“Have you ever read this?” he asked, holding up his novel. It was Bourget's “Cruelle Enigme.”

Kent nodded.

“I skimmed it through here one night while waiting for you. I have no patience with that sort of thing.”

“Possibly not,” remarked Wither, “but that's a fact about yourself, and not about the book.”

“I don't believe it is human life,” replied Kent. “People can't make animal passion the keynote of their lives nowadays.”

“Why not nowadays?”

“The conditions of life prevent it. The savage has furious brute instincts, which he gratifies occasionally, when his mind is not taken up with fighting and hunting for his food. It may be the guiding principle in a splendid barbarism like some Eastern courts, where men have little else to think of. But in our modern civilisation there are other interests too absorbing. The hurry of life is too great.”

“What about the empty-minded women you are always railing at?”

“They are all absorbed in their futilities—at least most of them,” he added, correcting himself; “but even when idle they are not beasts. Now this woman you are reading about is a beast.”

Wither eyed him curiously.

“You are talking nonsense, old chap. If she had been simply that, she would not have been a problem to the psychologist. The enigma was the sudden burst into animalism in the midst of a love that was almost idyllic.”

“Bosh!” said Kent. “It was the same old hideous adultery.”

“Oh, well! if you go on those lines, I am done,” replied Wither, shrugging his shoulders. “I thought we were a little more advanced in our ideas in this establishment.”

“You know I don't mean that,” said Kent, puffing violently at his pipe. “The legality of the connection has nothing to do with it. It is the eternal coupling of the male and the female that revolts me. Pah! They might as well write a novel on the loves of the pastures.”

“If I could write French, I should like to try it,” said Wither. “It would be interesting.”

“There is too much of that sort of thing written and talked about,” said Kent. “It's sickening. It's degradation of humanity.”

“Well, it's not uncommon,” said Wither, with a sphinxlike smile playing round the corners of his mouth as he gazed upwards at the cigarette smoke.

“Look here, Wither,” said Kent; “I have a higher faith in humanity. You profess to be a cynic, a man of the world, and you delight in calling yourself nonmoral. That's all foolishness, I know. You are the kindest hearted little chap in the world. But can you, as a man of intellectual tastes, sympathise with all this animalism?”

Wither threw away his cigarette, and bending forward laid his hand on Kent's knee.

“My dear old boy,” he said, with more earnestness than he generally displayed, “I do call myself a man of the world, for I'm in it and I love it, and I have a very decent bowing acquaintance as well with its pals, the Flesh and the Devil. I know something of men, and as for women, it has been my lot to have been petted by a good few—my size lends itself to that sort of thing. In fact, Gulliver with the Brobdingnag maids of honour is not in it with me. I know all about 'em; and I tell you, old chap, that the Beast, sometimes with a big B and sometimes in diamond type, lies in the nature of us all. There is not a living being with pure blood in his or her veins who is not overmastered at times by the principle of sex. You scoff at Bourget as a writer of morbid and impossible fiction. Look at your daily papers. Don't you see parsons of hitherto blameless lives running off with their cooks, virtuous women ruining their lives and their husbands' for the sake of some Hercules of a scoundrel—just as the patrician ladies in Rome went mad over the charioteers in the circus! Man alive! it is the Beast, the Beast that may slumber in an old maid's bosom until she is sixty and then drive her into the arms of her footman. How otherwise have you accounted for these things?”

“I have not tried,” replied Kent simply. “They have not interested me. They are diseases of the brain, for the physiologist to study, like suicide and murder. I don't believe in them in normal everyday life.”

There was a long pause, broken only by Wither's request that Kent should put some coals on the fire, and the rattling of the operation. Wither resumed his reading and Kent pulled at his pipe in silence. At last the former looked up and said suddenly:

“Why do you think people marry?”

“That's funny,” replied Kent, with a slight start. “I was just wondering myself. I don't know: money, companionship, family, idiocy—God knows what.”

“It has always struck me that you would be the first of us to go,” said the other in pure, idle maliciousness.

“I?” cried Kent, with a gesture of disgust. “I marry! give up my work, procreate children I couldn't support! Have to kiss and pet and fondle a woman——”

“Well, you need not do that unless you like,” replied Wither, laughing in his gnomelike way. “She might expect it, but she would be soon consoled by the blessedness of pure spirituality.”

Kent's reply was interrupted by the return of the absentees, Fairfax, the doctor, and Greene.

“I am so glad you fellows have come back,” said Kent; “Wither has been drivelling on his favourite topic until I was beginning to loathe him.”

“He's an immoral little wretch,” said the doctor, throwing his greatcoat on Wither's curled-up body—“a pocket Mephistopheles. We keep him here as a kind of Familiar. Oh, what rot dining out is!” he added, with a yawn and a stretch as he seated his burly form on the foot of the couch. “I wish I had stayed at home.”

“I wish you had,” said Kent. “Let us have just one rubber before I go. There is time.”

But Kent walked home that night with a new trouble at his heart that kept him awake a great part of the night.

Meanwhile Clytie was not enjoying herself at Durdleham. At first there were eager embraces, trifling tendernesses and solicitudes. The dear prodigal had returned, but the fatted calf was killed discreetly, lest it should convey a husk-flavoured reproach. Grace and Janet bubbled over with light Durdleham gossip, seeking to interest, and Clytie earnestly and sympathetically sought to be in touch with her surroundings. It was a real heartfelt effort on both sides towards harmony. But it soon became patent that these efforts were unavailing. Clytie saw the old prejudices barring her at every turn. She recognised with the bitterness of disillusionment that she was the bit of grit in the family machinery, stopping the smoothness of its working. As long as she identified herself with Durdleham interests things went well; but as soon as she, in her turn, ventured to sketch the bright incidents in her town life she felt a check in the current of mutual sympathy. If she was reserved, her sisters complained. They ought to know something of her friends, her occupations. When she was expansive they shrank cold and crablike into their mail of prejudice.

Her intimacy with a strange Bohemian man was a thorn in the side of the family. Mr. Davenant considered it extremely injudicious, and Mrs. Blather whispered to him that she scarcely thought it moral. Janet was too horrified to allude directly to the circumstance. But, in her neat, prim bedchamber, she prayed to the Almighty to lead her erring sister out of the paths of temptation. She duly informed Clytie of this act of piety, and when Clytie burst into laughter that was nearer to tears than to merriment, left the room in virtuous indignation.

Clytie could not help confessing to herself that she longed for Kent's companionship, with its broader sympathies and inspiring influences, but the view the household took of it pained her with a sense of aching discomfort, and made her feel a strange diffidence in writing to him as she had promised. She at last addressed him a short little note, stiff and constrained, which reached him the morning after his conversation with Wither and did not help to cheer him. Too proud to wait for an opportunity of posting this letter herself, she placed it on the hall slab together with the rest of the outgoing correspondence of the family. Although a hundred letters might have lain there for post without any one of them attracting Mrs. Blather's attention,—she was too pure-minded a gentlewoman for idle curiosity to be one of her failings,—it was too good an opportunity for the imps who seem sometimes to regulate human affairs to let slip, and as a matter of course Mrs. Blather's eye fell upon the address.

“So you are keeping up a violent correspondence with that man,” she remarked acidly to Clytie. It is the way of some women to exaggerate.

Clytie bit her lip, cheeking an impulsive answer. What was the use of a retort?

Women of broad, liberal education, with interests beyond the nursery, still-room, and the afternoon-tea table, are known to live together, like men, in comparative harmony. They have learned the lesson the higher, broader life teaches of rising or declining instinctively to another being's plane of thought or feeling. It is hardly a fault of sex that women are petty, spiteful, and intolerant. When the conditions of life are narrow and illiberal any human being, man or woman, runs the risk of being shaped by them. And that is why Mrs. Blather and Janet, good, upright women according to their lights, subordinated their affection to their principles, and stood away shocked from their sister. Their traditional ideals of femininity had been sinned against. The crime was all but unpardonable. It was always present with them, always assuming fresh, distorted shapes. They were on a different plane from Clytie, and viewed all her actions in a false perspective.

Clytie was hurt, wounded in her womanly pride. She knew that there was much clay in her composition, and often felt with chastening self-abasement how much nearer the angels Winifred was than herself. Yet she was accustomed to live in an atmosphere free from reproach. Winifred, Kent, the Farquharsons, and others of her friends might touch with light, tender finger on here and there an imperfection in her character or conduct; for this she was grateful, knowing the deeper feelings of esteem and respect that prompted. But to move in a circle where she was looked upon as a black sheep, as a girl on the path to unutterable abysses, galled her to the quick, sent the hot blood mounting in stinging waves to her cheek, leaving the heart cold. Yet she had learned not to blame her sisters over much. She had lost her militant scorn of Jacob. Kent had taught her that although Esau might possess the higher birthright which no bartering of pottage could alienate, there was still saving grace in the stolen birthright which Jacob guarded so jealously. But this knowledge did not make her heart less sore.

The happiest time in this Christmas visit was when she could get away into the old lumber-attic in which she had dreamed so many girlish dreams. It had long been dismantled of the Liberty curtains, Persian rugs, and cheap Japaneseries that had lent it the suggestion of artistic atmosphere the girl of eighteen had craved. It was bare now, except for a table and chair and a few odds and ends of artist's materials, but a fire could be laid in the grate to make things look cheery, and there was still the deeply recessed attic-window where she could stand and look out over the same drear landscape. It was only the ordinary midland succession of fields, now black with winter, and pastures through which the river ran, its course only indicated by the fringing line of pollards and willows. Away on the slope to the west rose a clump of trees from which peeped a few houses and a church spire, the little village of Wexwith. In the foreground ran the highroad skirted with new red-brick cottages, a touch of sordidness added by man to the ungenerous dreariness of nature. Once this had affected Clytie with a sense of the unutterable melancholy of things. The young are prone to be so affected. They are rather proud when they realise it; it is a kind of youthful vanity. But Clytie, like the wiser among us, sought brightness as she grew older, and although she could not consider the landscape cheerful, looked at it only through the memories of five years. Every spot had associations for her. There was the cottage where she had seen the little bully strike his playmate, the original conception of the picture that had helped to cause her welcome banishment from home. Next to it used to live the old beldame who threw out of doors the custards and jellies that Janet with angelic perseverance used to take her. What cruel mockery she used to make of Janet in those days! Now she submissively helped to carry the custards. Behind the swelling uplands over the village the sun set, a red ball in the wintry sky. For how many wild fantastic daubs had not that formed a background!

It was during these reveries that the picture subject she craved commenced to haunt her as it gradually shaped itself into definiteness. Since her singular interview with the French girl at Dinan a lurid gleam streamed from the gates ajar of mysteries that had baffled her. She had read widely and deeply; but books are only the gloss of life, they are not the text. Its secrets must be read in the living world, with much pain and sleeplessness and wearied eyes. The throbbing page had been presented to Clytie for one sharp moment, blazing, the while, in letters of flame. Such knowledge changes lingering girlhood into womanhood without the aid of passion. It changes sex-pride into sex-sorrow—in higher natures, be it understood. And this sex-sorrow runs in channels hollowed out by ever-varying circumstance and temperament. It flows in the patient, all-enduring devotion of the sister labouring among outcasts, in the militant enthusiasm of the social reformer. It quivers in the hearts of teachers like George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It lives in the souls of some mothers who tremulously watch the shaping of their daughter's destiny. With Clytie it ran confluent with her artistic impulses. It had influenced them vaguely, dimly, hauntingly for months, but now, at last, stirringly, proclaiming itself, insistently demanding expression.

The subject was found: Faustina in her innocent maidenhood. The problem: how to manifest the foreshadowings of passion on the young, clear face?

Clytie spent hours in her attic trying to fix the summer lightnings of features that flashed elusively before her mind. She wished she were in London, to go abroad in the highways seeking after a face. It seemed to her that in the great city she would find the one she wanted, in the park, at the theatre, perhaps among the subdued black rows of women—lines of suppressed volcanic workings—in some great shop. But in Durdleham volcanoes were extinct or regulated by formula to erupt with mild propriety. She began to feel the frenzied weariness of helplessness. If only she could talk to someone—to Kent.

One day Mrs. Blather came into the attic. Clytie was dreaming before incoherent charcoal streaks. The fire had burned low and the draught of the opening door made her shiver.

“Why, Clytie, child, you are blue with cold,” said her sister, wrapping her gray woollen shawl more tightly round her thin shoulders. “Why do you mope up here?”

“I am not moping, Gracie,” replied Clytie; “I am only working—conceiving a picture, that's all.”

“Oh, but you oughtn't to do any work. Have you not come down for a holiday? What's the good of burning the candle at both ends? Come down to the drawing-room and talk to the Howatsons; they are inquiring after you.”

“But I am in such a mess!” laughed Clytie, showing her blackened finger tips.

“Well, come down and tidy yourself in my room; there is a fire, and you can warm yourself for a few minutes.” Clytie followed her sister down the stairs to the latter's bedroom, where a cheerful fire warmed the cold clean chintz of the hangings. Mrs. Blather sat down by the hearth, while Clytie washed her hands and touched her hair.

“Why don't you tell us more of your work, Clytie?” she said propitiatingly. “Here you are being criticised in the newspapers, quite like a famous person, and we at home know nothing of it.”

“Why, Gracie, I thought it did not interest you much.”

“We would take an interest if you would only let us.”

“But, you see, I paint such queer pictures. I don't think they are your style. And then pictures are not portable like books. If I wrote poetry, you could be deluged with presentation copies; but even we ourselves lose all the result of our work when the picture is sold.”

“Of course, but you might write and talk more. And with regard to the 'queer' pictures, don't you think, if you made us your confidantes, the pictures might be a little less—'queer'? You see, Clytie, you are young, and it is your nature to run into extremes. If you were just a little bit restrained by older folks, would you not get what you are so fond of talking about—'truth'—in your work?”

Clytie was somewhat puzzled at Mrs. Blather's conciliatory tone. Was this an effort towards a better understanding, or was it a disguised lecture? She finished her hasty toilet and went and stood by the fire near her sister, her foot on the fender.

“Thank you very much, Gracie,” she said, “but would you always understand? Perhaps,” she added, smiling, after a pause, “you would want to restrain too much—and where would the picture be?”

“Well, why not try? What is the picture to be about that you are working at now?”

The blood rushed to Clytie's cheeks, which, bent down, caught the added glow of the fire—a contrast, with her rich colour, to the clear, waxen, negative face of her sister. She broke suddenly into a nervous laugh.

“There! Even from the beginning I couldn't discuss it with you, Gracie. It is only a girl's face—I can't tell you anything more about it.”

“Well, that's what I complain of,” said Mrs. Blather with growing acidity. “You keep your own sisters in ignorance of your life, and confide everything to this Mr. Kent, who is nothing to you.”

“How do you know I have told Mr. Kent about this picture?”

“I was not referring to this one, though by your manner I see you have.”

“Well, yes, I have,” said Clytie, “because—because—he has the artistic temperament—and he can seize an idea—in fact—why are you saying this to me, Gracie?”

“Because you are not going the right way, Clytie; and it is my duty as your elder sister, who has looked after you since you were so high, to make a last effort to bring you within some restraining influences. We don't like your intimacy with Mr. Kent. It is not what we have been taught to think right. I know you look down upon us as narrow-minded at Durdleham. I think it is better for us. We are shut in, perhaps, between high walls, but the high walls keep us safe.”

They were silent for a few moments, then Clytie said: “Gracie, don't you think this subject has been enough discussed? It is wasting words and spoiling good intentions. Suppose we go down to the Howatsons.”