“No, but Legrun did. I brought all the old rags from the old shop and renewed the stock here, and those four walls were one delicate glimmer of colour, when, as Satan himself arranged it, who should come shambling and blaspheming up the stairs one blessed Sabbath day but Legrun, who insists upon having our addresses. I thought he’d have a fit when he sat down gasping and glaring at the walls. ‘My good lad,’ he roared at last, ‘how old are you?’ ‘Nineteen,’ says I, shaking like a jelly fish. ‘I thought you were nine,’ he yelled, ‘and making a doll’s house; clean down that filth, clean it from the decent lime-washed walls that never injured you, and remember—remember, boy, that Art is serious, severe, stern, grave, terrible,’ he shrieked, waving his arms like a maniac, and spitting horribly, ‘it will stand no tricks, no mockings, _parbleu_! Rags!—Filth!—with the disease shock full in them! Gur! Guz! Hu! Never no more let me see such sights!’ and he raged down the stairs into the street, spitting, and scraping his throat,—he lives in an awful funk of infection,—and so I had to strip off my rags and leave the walls to their native nakedness.” “You can have your revenge when you set up on your own account. Gwen, it is nearly six o’clock.” “Yes, we must go. We’ll see you at dinner, Mr. Brydon?” “Will you walk or drive, Gwen?” “I will drive,” she said, and there was a dull, tired tone in her voice. CHAPTER XXVII. GWEN was in an unusual humour this afternoon. She was silent until they got into the _fiacre_, but directly it moved she began to talk in a swift even way peculiarly her own. Everything she said had the calm cold brilliancy of steel about it, and she advanced the most dangerously heterodox opinions in a most unimpassioned and frozen style. Strange shrugged his shoulders with grim good humour as she went on. He admired her splendid insolence, as any man would have done; all the same, he felt a half frantic longing for that picture-bride and an ever-increasing wonder as to how any woman cast in the same mould, eye for eye, mouth for mouth, dimple for dimple, curve for curve, could so atrociously belie her nature. Suddenly Gwen veered round and turned the conversation into a personal and analytical channel. She had never done it before, except in her one brief allusion to the yellow aster. “That boy of yours is a genius, Humphrey, your swan is no goose,” said she, “but, tell me, did I look in the very least like that woman, the day you married me?” He looked at her face of fine scorn. “Not in the least, except in the matter of form, and colour, and pose. These are you in tangible flesh and blood.” “What did you mean by your ‘prophetic’?” she demanded, casting pink shadows over her face as she moved the red silk blind slowly to and fro. “The possibility of your being as she is one day.” “Ah!” The blind moved a little faster and her hand held it tighter.