cry too....

_A Patron of the Arts_

A lull followed this crisis in the affairs of No. 29 Werter Road. Priam
went on painting, and there was now no need for secrecy about it. But
his painting was not made a subject of conversation. Both of them
hesitated to touch it, she from tact, and he because her views on the
art seemed to him to be lacking in subtlety. In every marriage there is
a topic--there are usually several--which the husband will never broach
to the wife, out of respect for his respect for her. Priam scarcely
guessed that Alice imagined him to be on the way to lunacy. He thought
she merely thought him queer, as artists _are_ queer to non-artists. And
he was accustomed to that; Henry Leek had always thought him queer. As
for Alice's incredulous attitude towards the revelation of his identity,
he did not mentally accuse her of treating him as either a liar or a
madman. On reflection he persuaded himself that she regarded the story
as a bad joke, as one of his impulsive, capricious essays in the absurd.

Thus the march of evolution was apparently arrested in Werter Road
during three whole days. And then a singular event happened, and
progress was resumed. Priam had been out since early morning on the
riverside, sketching, and had reached Barnes, from which town he
returned over Barnes Common, and so by the Upper Richmond Road to High
Street. He was on the south side of Upper Richmond Road, whereas his
tobacconist's shop was on the north side, near the corner. An unfamiliar
peculiarity of the shop caused him to cross the street, for he was not
in want of tobacco. It was the look of the window that drew him. He
stopped on the refuge in the centre of the street. There was no
necessity to go further. His picture of Putney Bridge was in the middle
of the window. He stared at it fixedly. He believed his eyes, for his
eyes were the finest part of him and never deceived him; but perhaps if
he had been a person with ordinary eyes he would scarce have been able
to believe them. The canvas was indubitably there present in the window.
It had been put in a cheap frame such as is used for chromographic
advertisements of ships, soups, and tobacco. He was almost sure that he
had seen that same frame, within the shop, round a pictorial
announcement of Taddy's Snuff. The tobacconist had probably removed the
eighteenth-century aristocrat with his fingers to his nose, from the
frame, and replaced him with Putney Bridge. In