“You look just as young as the first day I met you,” he continued; “haven’t changed a hair. I suppose it’s care that kills men as well as cats. There’s more real care in a successful career than in a failure. A small shopkeeper can’t lose much, and doesn’t run many risks. Now I—why, good Lord! I may go bust—sky high—any day. Big business is all a big gamble, the margin between a huge profit and a huge loss is so small—a puff of wind, and over you go on the money side. Now you—you’re above fate now; you’re known; competition can never touch you; the speculation is entirely on the part of those who buy your pictures. In a hundred years they may be worth thousands or nothing. Yes, you’re a lucky devil.”
“Luck? It’s the only real thing in the world. It rules the world! Believe in it? Of course I do. I shouldn’t ever have been anything more than a small shopkeeper if I hadn’t been lucky. I inherited a tiny corner shop in a back street; fate—or the Metropolitan Board of Works—decided to drive a new thoroughfare past my place. Wasn’t that luck? Isn’t marriage all a matter of luck? What man can know anything at all about his wife, until she is his wife and free to show him her real self? Luck! I never trust the man who sneers at luck and talks about the reward of honest labor; he’s a liar or a fool, both equally bad to deal with in business.”
“I don’t believe in luck. Which am I, knave or fool?”
“Oh, you’re an artist, and the artistic temperament covers a multitude of eccentricities.”
The hooting of a motor-horn drew him to the window again, from which a glimpse of the road could be seen.
“Hullo! Here’s Alice and Agatha, early birds too. But she’s come to bully you into starting the portrait. Are you going to do it?”
He put down his palette, took the picture off the easel and set it in a corner with its face to the wall, and then went out to welcome his guests, followed by West.
“Oh, Mr. Maddison, I do hope you don’t mind my having come,” said Mrs. West, leaning from the car, and holding out her small, daintily gloved hand. “May I come in? I want to talk business.”
“Delighted, Mrs. West. Good morning, Miss Lane.”
“I guessed you’d come here, Phil,” Mrs. West went on, as Maddison helped her to alight, “but you’re not to stay. You take Alice for a spin and then come back for us. Perhaps Mr. Maddison will come back to lunch with us?”