It made you self-conscious in the extreme to attempt to be true to a nice little talent, and week by week Grover's drawing was becoming worse, if anything. During this difficult interval, he argued, he might as well pick up all the technical tricks he could, and, weary of trying to express his immortal soul through messy renderings of what he could see from the window of his bedroom, he gave himself over to a course with the master at the Beaux Arts and afternoons at the life class in the rue de la Grande Chaumière. At least his pencil and brush strokes were becoming more professional; he had advanced to the point where he could place a line or a curve fairly accurately at the first shot, and his sketches no longer had the blurred, fuzzy, tentative and rubbed-out appearance they once had had.
His social energy was being economized too, for he dissipated less time in the cafes and studios. Léon, for whom he had eagerly searched after the encounter with his sister, was out of town; there was a report that he had gone to Cannes. As Grover had read a news item to the effect that Mme. Janvier had returned from America and was resting at her villa on the Riviera, there was an obvious deduction to be made.
One March afternoon he stood at the window of the grande pièce and gazed down at the little laundry, at the end of his resources. To remain indoors seemed futile, to go out more so. Hanging before his eyes was an old-fashioned translucent portrait on glass of
