He seemed in good repute too, and talked of fifty
guineas for a picture with the utmost coolness. He must have earned a good
deal of money, and the money must have gone somewhere. In all the details
of his home there was evidence of extravagance in the past and poverty in
the present.
He came at eleven o'clock on the second morning after Madame Caballero's
reception; came in a hired carriage, with his easel and all the
paraphernalia of his art. Mr. Granger had made a point of being present at
this first sitting, much to the discomfiture of Clarissa, who was yearning
for a long uninterrupted talk with her brother. Even when Mr. Granger
was absent, there would be Miss Granger, most likely, she thought, with
vexation; and, after all, these meetings with Austin would be only half
meetings. It would be pleasant only to see him, to hear his voice; but she
was longing to talk freely of the past, to give him counsel for the future.
The drawing-room looking north was rather a dreary apartment, if any
apartment furnished with blue-satin damask and unlimited gilding can be
called dreary. There was splendour, of course, but it was a chilling kind
of splendour. The room was large and square, with two tall wide windows
commanding a view of one of the dullest streets in new Paris--a street at
the end of which workmen were still busy cutting away a hill, the removal
whereof was necessary for the realisation of the Augustan idea of that
archetypal city, which was to be left all marble.
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