And so he went to the coast, as happy as a school-boy on a holiday.
The sea fascinated him, and the faces of the men who go down to the
sea in ships. It was going to be the happiest and most fruitful
summer he had known for years. He bade the Hemingways a gay
farewell. Mrs. Hemingway, he noted, looked at him speculatively. Her
matrimonial plans for him had revived.
He worked gloriously. He ate like a school-boy, and slept like one,
dreamlessly. What was happening in the outside world didn't interest
him; what he had to do was to catch a little of the immortal and yet
shifting loveliness of the world and imprison it on a piece of
canvas. He didn't get any of the newspapers. When he smoked at night
with his friend the cure, a gentle, philosophic old priest who had
known a generation of painter-folk and loved this painter with a
fatherly affection, he heard passing bits of world gossip. The
priest took several papers, and liked to talk over with his artist
friend what he had read. It was the priest, pale and perturbed, who
told him that war was upon the world.
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