📔 The Moon and Sixpence

As a rule he was neat in his person, but now his clothes were in disorder. He looked suddenly bedraggled. I was convinced he had been drinking, and I smiled.

It was a tall, shabby building, that cannot have been painted for years, and it had so bedraggled an air that the houses on each side of it looked neat and clean.

While I dressed—for Stroeve wished me to go at once with him to the hospital—he told me that he had arranged for his wife to have a private room, so that she might at least be spared the sordid promiscuity of a ward.

They were not niggardly, these tramps, and he who had money did not hesitate to share it among the rest.

I walked in, and Stroeve followed me. The room was in darkness. I could only see that it was an attic, with a sloping roof; and a faint glimmer, no more than a less profound obscurity, came from a skylight.

“Haven't you been in love since you came to Paris?” “I haven't got time for that sort of nonsense. Life isn't long enough for love and art.” “Your appearance doesn't suggest the anchorite.”

"Do you mean to say you didn't leave your wife for another woman?" / "Of course not." / "On your word of honour?" / I don't know why I asked for that. It was very ingenuous of me.

"I'm starting to-morrow. This is perhaps the last time we shall ever meet." I made an appropriate rejoinder, and he smiled wanly.

It is still possible to discuss his place in art, and the adulation of his admirers is perhaps no less capricious than the disparagement of his detractors; [...]

If in the loneliness of his studio he wrestled desperately with the Angel of the Lord he never allowed a soul to divine his anguish.