A Favourite has no Friends.
It was my first professional visit to the Robinsons. I had been called
in to prescribe for Arthur Robinson, a nervous, emaciated young man,
whom I found extended on a black satin sofa, in a purple silk dressing
gown embroidered with life-sized hydrangeas. The sofa and the dressing
gown shrieked aloud his artistic temperament.
He had a bronchial cold, and my visit was, as he said, purely
precautionary. He kept me a long time recounting his symptoms, and
assuring me that he was absolutely fearless, and then dragged himself to
his feet and led me into the magnificent studio his mother had built for
him, where his sketches were arranged on easels, and where we found his
wife, a pale, dark-eyed young creature cleaning his brushes.
He appeared--like most egotistic people--to be greatly in need of a
listener, and he poured forth his views on art, and the form his own
message to the world would probably take. I am unfortunately quite
inartistic, but I gave him my attention. I was in no hurry, for at that
time the one perpetual anxiety that dogged my waking hours was that I
had not enough patients.
At last I remembered that I ought not to appear to have time to spare,
and his wife took me downstairs to the drawing-room, where his mother
was awaiting us, a large, fair woman, with a kindly foolish face.