Soames walked eastwards, mousing doggedly along on the shady side.
The house wanted doing, up, unless he decided to move into the country,
and build.
For the hundredth time that month he turned over this problem. There
was no use in rushing into things! He was very comfortably off, with an
increasing income getting on for three thousand a year; but his invested
capital was not perhaps so large as his father believed--James had a
tendency to expect that his children should be better off than they
were. 'I can manage eight thousand easily enough,' he thought, 'without
calling in either Robertson's or Nicholl's.'
He had stopped to look in at a picture shop, for Soames was an 'amateur'
of pictures, and had a little-room in No. 62, Montpellier Square, full
of canvases, stacked against the wall, which he had no room to hang.
He brought them home with him on his way back from the City, generally
after dark, and would enter this room on Sunday afternoons, to spend
hours turning the pictures to the light, examining the marks on their
backs, and occasionally making notes.
They were nearly all landscapes with figures in the foreground, a
sign of some mysterious revolt against London, its tall houses, its
interminable streets, where his life and the lives of his breed and
class were passed. Every now and then he would take one or two pictures
away with him in a cab, and stop at Jobson's on his way into the City.
He rarely showed them to anyone; Irene, whose opinion he secretly
respected and perhaps for that reason never solicited, had only been
into the room on rare occasions, in discharge of some wifely duty. She
was not asked to look at the pictures, and she never did. To Soames this
was another grievance. He hated that pride of hers, and secretly dreaded
it.
In the plate-glass window of the picture shop his image stood and looked
at him.
His sleek hair under the brim of the tall hat had a sheen like the hat
itself; his cheeks, pale and flat, the line of his clean-shaven lips,
his firm chin with its greyish shaven tinge, and the buttoned strictness
of his black cut-away coat, conveyed an appearance of reserve
and secrecy, of imperturbable, enforced composure; but his eyes,
cold,--grey, strained--looking, with a line in the brow between them,
examined him wistfully, as if they knew of a secret weakness.
He noted the subjects of the pictures, the names of the painters, made
a calculation of their values, but without the satisfaction he usually
derived from this inward appraisement, and walked on.