The Well-Beloved

'Well--I'll say nothing then, more than how wonderful it is that a woman should have been able to put back the clock of Time thirty years!'

'It shames me now, Jocelyn. I shall never do it any more!'

* * * As soon as he was strong enough he got her to take him round to his studio in a carriage. The place had been kept aired, but the shutters were shut, and they opened them themselves. He looked round upon the familiar objects--some complete and matured, the main of them seedlings, grafts, and scions of beauty, waiting for a mind to grow to perfection in.

'No--I don't like them!' he said, turning away. 'They are as ugliness to me! I don't feel a single touch of kin with or interest in any one of them whatever.'

'Jocelyn--this is sad.'

'No--not at all.' He went again towards the door. 'Now let me look round.' He looked back, Marcia remaining silent. 'The Aphrodites--how I insulted her fair form by those failures!--the Freyjas, the Nymphs and Fauns, Eves, Avices, and other innumerable Well-Beloveds--I want to see them never any more!... "Instead of sweet smell there shall be stink, and there shall be burning instead of beauty," said the prophet.'

And they came away. On another afternoon they went to the National Gallery, to test his taste in paintings, which had formerly been good. As she had expected, it was just the same with him there. He saw no more to move him, he declared, in the time-defying presentations of Perugino, Titian, Sebastiano, and other statuesque creators than in the work of the pavement artist they had passed on their way.

'It is strange!' said she.

'I don't regret it. That fever has killed a faculty which has, after all, brought me my greatest sorrows, if a few little pleasures. Let us be gone.'

He was now so well advanced in convalescence that it was deemed a most desirable thing to take him down into his native air. Marcia agreed to accompany him. 'I don't see why I shouldn't,' said she. 'An old friendless woman like me, and you an old friendless man.'

'Yes. Thank Heaven I am old at last. The curse is removed.'

It may be shortly stated here that after his departure for the isle Pierston never again saw his studio or its contents. He had been down there but a brief while when, finding his sense of beauty in art and nature absolutely extinct, he directed his agent in town to disperse the whole collection; which was done. His lease of the building was sold, and in the course of time another sculptor won admiration there from those who knew not Joseph. The next year his name figured on the retired list of Academicians.