by-paths of the world, that George Martin shrunk from social intercourse with his contemporaries. He was in every way fitted to shine where culture and cleverness and polished manners were esteemed. And he would probably have liked to have earned distinction in this way; but somehow he had turned his life into different channels. Indolence and industry had combined to effect this. He could not sufficiently apply himself to the wooing of society's smiles and caresses; he followed with too great an avidity contrary pursuits. But in the society of his friends in Freer Street, he found considerations for his tastes in both directions. There was an elegance and refinement and repose about Violet it would have been hard anywhere to match. He felt that to earn her regard was a fair exercise of all his powers of pleasing. While her husband was his valued fellow-workman, whose presence was a warrant for his adherence to professional considerations.
"Don't you think, Mr. Martin, that Wilford is looking very much too pale and thin?" Violet asked.
"This is Violet's constant crotchet, you must know, Martin. I believe we are all said to be slightly insane on certain topics. This is Violet's weak point—my state of health; my paleness and thinness. I really ought to be a skeleton by this time, considering the shocking way in which I've been going on, or going off, I should rather say, during the last two years, according to Vi's account."
"Yes, you always try to laugh off the question," said Violet; "but I shall still ask Mr. Martin to give me his opinion."
"Well, say Martin; do I look very pale and thin?" asked Wilford.
"Yes, I think you do. I've been thinking so for some time past," answered his friend.
"I was sure Mr. Martin would agree with me," exclaimed Violet.
"Yes, Vi, but it's only to agree with you that he says so."
"No; my opinion is perfectly unprejudiced. You ought really to take a holiday. I am sure you have earned one; you have been working very hard indeed of late."
"No holiday for me, just at present. I must see my book safely through the press, first; then we can, perhaps, begin to think about holiday-making. Do you know, Martin, it's rather cruel and tiring, and desponding work, correcting one's proofs. They come dropping in, day after day, a sheet at a time. One gets to have at last such a minced notion of one's book; at least so I find it. I grow so giddy over the fragments, I can't put them together at all at last, and fail to have any idea as to what the thing is really like and worth as a whole."
"I see you've been torturing yourself dreadfully. You really ought to have a change; or you'll get much worse if you've taken to thinking in this way. Let me prescribe for you," said Martin. "Go to Paris for a week."
"Thank you, Mr. Martin," said Violet, gaily, "that is precisely my advice. He needs change very much, and I am sure a week at Paris would be a great benefit to him."
"No, no," said her husband, rather seriously, "that would never do; besides," he added, "I hate Paris."
"You hate Paris! You heretic!" cried Martin, laughing. "But I forgot, everyone does not think as I do, though that is not a reason why I should be wrong. But I am not an imaginative writer, I don't deal in fiction—I criticise, I don't create; and it seems to me that there are only two places worth living in—London and Paris. I would divide my time equally between them if I could; but I am obliged to remain in London the greater part of the year; when I do get a holiday I go to Paris; the holiday over, I return to London."
"You do not care, then, for the country, nor the seaside?" Violet asked.
"I prefer people to places; I would sooner have crowds of faces round me than be alone in the midst of magnificent scenery. A mountain is very superb, but can one look at it honestly for more than five minutes? Is it not exhausted and done with at the end of that time, especially if one is neither a poet nor a painter? And the sea is very grand, and I enjoy it immensely for a quarter of an hour; I watch it bend down and turn summersaults and tumble into foam; I watch the repetition of this feat again and again, till at last I think I know all about it, I begin to yawn a little, I grow decidedly weary; I think I know all the sea can do; disrespectfully I throw a stone at it and turn from the beach to see about the Paris or the London trains. A dreadful confession, is it not, Mrs. Wilford?"
"Yes; and I can only half believe it. But the country—do you not find it a great relief after hard work in town?"
"It's too great a relief. The violent change upsets me. The absence of noise, for instance; the awful quiet of the country makes me feel somehow not that there is no noise, but that I am suddenly deaf and can't hear it—not a comfortable sensation. And country fare is too good for me, it makes me ill—I miss my metropolitan adulterations—and then I so miss the crowd; I want the streets and shops and houses, the swarms of men and women."
"But the scenery?"
"Very wonderful and charming, but it never keeps my attention long. I have nothing in common with it, so it seems to me. There is a want of human interest in it. Do you care for reading poetry that is all landscape and colour, flowers and water and sky, and hasn't one fellow-creature breathing through it? I confess it tires me dreadfully. I am frightfully practical. I have lived so long in towns that I have lost my taste perhaps for the country, just as captives become so accustomed to their prisons that they quit them with regret. And there is no real solitude and retirement in the country; where there are so very few people every one becomes as it were the public property of the rest. For real isolation and quiet, London, after all, is the only place."
"And especially a top room in the Temple, London."
"Yes. One is there snug and uncared for—