The Temperament of an Artist

"You may sit there and smoke, and look out upon your wonderful Paris,"
Anna said lightly. "You may talk--if you can talk cheerfully, not
unless."

"And you?" asked David Courtlaw.

"Well, if I find your conversation interesting I shall listen. If not,
I have plenty to think about," she answered, leaning back in her
chair, and watching the smoke from her own cigarette curl upwards.

"For instance?"

She smiled.

"How I am to earn enough _sous_ for my dinner to-morrow--or failing
that, what I can sell."

His face darkened.

"And yet," he said, "you bid me talk cheerfully, or not at all."

"Why not? Your spirits at least should be good. It is not you who runs
the risk of going dinnerless to-morrow."

He turned upon her almost fiercely.

"You know," he muttered, "you know quite well that your troubles are
far more likely to weigh upon me than my own. Do you think that I am
utterly selfish?"

She raised her eyebrows.

"Troubles, my friend," she exclaimed lightly. "But I have no
troubles."

He stared at her incredulously, and she laughed very softly.

"What a gloomy person you are!" she murmured. "You call yourself an
artist--but you have no temperament. The material cares of life hang
about your neck like a millstone. A doubt as to your dinner to-morrow
would make you miserable to-night. You know I call that positively
wicked. It is not at all what I expected either. On the whole, I think
that I have been disappointed with the life here. There is so little
_abandon_, so little real joyousness."