Once he had been jealous of Stephen, but that was because he was a child in an adult’s world in those days. Now if Peg’s company warmed him, it did not set him tingling. He supposed that was why what he felt toward Alex Taylor was no more than pity. He had tumbled madly in love with an actress, and since he had rarely needed to measure the cost of anything in his life, he was not looking to what this would cost him in hurt and disappointment. Vinnie carried at the bottom of his portmanteau a sheaf of Taylor’s letters: ten of them delivered in three weeks time. The post had been scarcely as quick as his bleeding pen. The only time Taylor had found her company exclusively his, he complained, was the day of his sailing her out. And yet a blessing that: he felt that he must devour her alone. When a minnow can feast on a whale, Vinnie thought. He could not see himself making love to Peg; nor could he see Alex Taylor about it either. It was all in the letters he was carrying back to their sender: letters which numbered the flowers at her gate, the stars over her house, which excoriated her guests, a different batch every week, and one more revolting than the next…“That eel-like man, Valois, a prig of prigs named John Redmond, willing to pose for all and sundry artists and satisfied with no portrait of himself save that in his own mind.
