balance, it had been quite simpl—she no
longer paid him the rent. The Gallery might be
expected now at any time, after eighteen years of
barren usufruct, to pay its way, so that she was sure
her father would not feel it. Through this device
she still had twelve hundred a year, and by reducing
what she ate, and, in place of two Belgians in a poor
way, employing one Austrian in a poorer, practically
the same surplus for the relief of genius. After
three days at Robin Hill she carried her father back
with her to Town. In those three days she had
stumbled on the secret he had kept for two years,
and had instantly decided to cure him. She knew,
in fact, the very man. He had done wonders with.
Paul Post—that painter a little in advance
of Futurism; and she was impatient with her father
because his eyebrows would go up, and because he had
heard of neither. Of course, if he hadn’t
“faith” he would never get well!
It was absurd not to have faith in the man who had
healed Paul Post so that he had only just relapsed,
from having overworked, or overlived, himself again.
The great thing about this healer was that he relied
on Nature. He had made a special study of the
symptoms of Nature—when his patient failed
in any natural symptom he supplied the poison which
caused it—and there you were! She
was extremely hopeful. Her father had clearly
not been living a natural life at Robin Hill, and
she intended to provide the symptoms. He was—she
felt—out of touch with the times, which
was not natural; his heart wanted stimulating.
In the little Chiswick house she and the Austrian—a
grateful soul, so devoted to June for rescuing her
that she was in danger of decease from overwork—stimulated
Jolyon in all sorts of ways, preparing him for his
cure. But they could not keep his eyebrows down;
as, for example, when the Austrian woke him at eight
o’clock just as he was going to sleep, or June
took The Times away from him, because it was unnatural
to read “that stuff” when he ought to
be taking an interest in “life.”
He never failed, indeed, to be astonished at her resource,
especially in the evenings. For his benefit,
as she declared, though he suspected that she also
got something out of it, she assembled the Age so far
as it was satellite to genius; and with some solemnity
it would move up and down the studio before him in
the Fox-trot, and that more mental form of dancing—the
One-step—which so pulled against the music,
that Jolyon’s eyebrows would be almost lost
in his hair from wonder at the strain it must impose
on the dancer’s will-power. Aware that,
hung on the line in the Water Colour Society, he was
a back number to those with any pretension to be called
artists, he would sit in the darkest corner he could
find, and wonder about rhythm, on which so long ago
he had been raised. And when June brought some
girl or young man up to him, he would rise humbly
to their level so far as that was possible, and think:
’Dear me! This is very dull for them!’