. I placed it among those papers
which you read. It fell out on the floor of the cafe, and you saw the
rest. The man whose face is before you there, and who sent that to
me, was my best friend in the days when I was at school and college.
Afterwards, when a law-student, and, still later, when I began to
practise my profession, we lived together in a rare old house at
Fulham, with high garden walls and--but I forget, you do not know London
perhaps. Yes? Well, the house is neither here nor there; but I like to
think of those days and of that home. Luke Freeman--that was my friend's
name--was an artist and a clever one. He had made a reputation by his
paintings of Egyptian and Algerian life. He was brilliant and
original, an indefatigable worker. Suddenly, one winter, he became less
industrious, fitful in his work, gloomy one day and elated the next,
generally uncomfortable. What was the matter? Strange to say, although
we were such friends, we chose different sets of society, and therefore
seldom appeared at the same houses or knew the same people. He liked
most things continental; he found his social pleasures in that polite
Bohemia which indulges in midnight suppers and permits ladies to
smoke cigarettes after dinner, which dines at rich men's tables and is
hob-a-nob with Russian Counts, Persian Ministers, and German Barons.
That was not to my taste, save as a kind of dramatic entertainment to be
indulged in at intervals like a Drury Lane pantomime. But though I had
no proof that such was the case, I knew Luke Freeman's malady to be a
woman. I taxed him with it. He did not deny it. He was painting at the
time, I remember, and he testily and unprofitably drew his brush across
the face of a Copt woman he was working at, and bit off the end of a
cigar. I asked him if it was another man's wife; he promptly said no.
I asked him if there were any awkward complications any inconsiderate
pressure from the girl's parents of brothers; and he promptly told me to
be damned. I told him I thought he ought to know that an ambitious man
might as well drown himself at once as get a fast woman in his path.
Then he showed a faculty for temper and profanity that stunned me.
But the up shot was that I found the case straight enough to all
appearances. The woman was a foreigner and not easy to win; was
beautiful, had a fine voice, loved admiration, and possessed a scamp of
a brother who, wanted her to marry a foreigner, so that, according to