Page:Firecrackers a realistic novel.pdf/81

 vividly, in compensation, that sooner or later he would certainly stray across her path in a manner potentially more amusing than that which the atmosphere of a flower-shop might be depended upon to provide.

Paul was an even more alluring subject for study than Laura, for Laura, after all, only presented the eternally recurring spectacle of tradition confronted by change, but Campaspe could conceive no adequate reason why Paul should not have settled back into his own comfortable, pagan self after his marriage with the extremely rich, if somewhat pinguid, Vera Whittaker. She could only explain his recent moods by recourse to her theory of nerves, and it had not occurred to her before now that Paul was a prey tonerves. He did not, to be sure, seem exactly irritable—that state was reserved for the fair Vera—but he did seem more intense, more bored, and less, Campaspe judged, interesting, unless, perchance, this boiler-mender had produced some subtle metamorphosis in Paul which would again give him at least the validity of a mural decoration to repay the onlooker's casual glance, if, indeed, not the closer inspection of the collector on the lookout for a true Orcagna.

At this point in her meditation Campaspe's eye roved to the wall opposite, a wall on which were hanging three new pictures by a young Jew, Issachar Ber Rybbak, in which she recognized a kind of inspiration which aroused her appreciation more abun-