Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/101

Rh fresh—an odd, engaging dignity. He lived at the end of an alley that went out of an old, short, cobbled street, a street that went, in turn, out of a new, long, smooth avenue—street and avenue and alley having, however, in common a sort of social shabbiness; and he introduced them to the rather cold and blank little studio which he had lent to a comrade for the term of his elegant absence. The comrade was another ingenuous compatriot, to whom he had wired that tea was to await them, "regardless"; and this reckless repast, and the second ingenuous compatriot, and the far-away makeshift life, with its jokes and its gaps, its delicate daubs and its three or four chairs, its overflow of taste and conviction and its lack of most all else—these things wove round the occasion, a spell to which our hero unreservedly surrendered.

He liked the ingenuous compatriots—for two or three others soon gathered; he liked the delicate daubs and the free discriminations—involving references indeed, involving enthusiasms and execrations that made him, as they said, sit up; he liked, above all, the legend of good-humoured poverty, of mutual accommodation fairly raised to the romantic, that he soon read into the scene. The ingenuous compatriots showed a candour, he thought, surpassing even the candour of Woollett; they were red-haired and long-legged, they were quaint and queer and dear and droll; they made the place resound with the vernacular, which he had never known so marked as when figuring for the chosen language, he must suppose, of contemporary art. They twanged with a vengeance the æsthetic lyre—they drew from it wonderful airs. The aspect of their life had an admirable innocence; and he looked on occasion at Maria Gostrey, to see to what extent that element reached her. She gave him, however, for the hour, as she had given him the previous day, no further sign than to show how she dealt with boys; meeting them with the air of old Parisian practice that she had for everyone, for everything in turn. Wonderful about the delicate daubs, masterful about the way to make tea, trustful about the legs of chairs and familiarly reminiscent of those in the other time, the named, the numbered or the caricatured, who had flourished or failed, disappeared