Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 6,432 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works.

Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 6,432 pages of information about Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works.
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!’
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Complete Project Gutenberg John Galsworthy Works from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.