Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/273



HE morning on which Steven Lawrence met M. Barry and his daughter in the Luxembourg gardens had, as I have said, commenced an episode, destined to be no unimportant one, in his history. Time pressed upon him heavily still. Was he not in a city, shut away within walls from the sight of trees and sky, from the winds of heaven—above all, from the sense of personal liberty which, to a man only half-tamed like Steven, was as the very breath of life itself? But, yet, each day as it passed was no longer an actual enemy to be drugged, got rid of at any cost, as in the time when accounts of his wife's balls, and when his own aimless wanderings along streets and boulevards, had been his sole resource.

The shallow little sarcasm by which Dot had sought to describe his intimacy with Mademoiselle Barry had (as is often the case with shallow sarcasms) a deeper significance than the speaker supposed. In a certain sense, the last three weeks had been "educating" Steven Lawrence rapidly—educating him as only the society of a refined and gifted woman can, perhaps, ever educate a man whom accident rather than incapacity has debarred from culture in his youth. Lingering by Mademoiselle Barry's side in the Œil de Bœuf at Versailles, or on the spot where the Bastille fell, he had had the story of the great revolution brought before him vividly, picturesquely, as no book-labor of his own could ever have brought it. Through her informal teaching he had been led to see that within cities, at easels, desks, looms, pale-faced men had lived, and might be living, lives nobler, manlier (if to help on human progress be manly) than those of land-tillers in Kent, or even of hunters in the wilderness. From lips to whom the theme was one of love, he had been taught dimly to discern—he, a Lawrence, and a Shilobite—