Fortunately, the amiable people included
some very young people, so young that they could properly
compel Kendal to go into the fields with them and make
cowslip balls, and some robust girls of eighteen and
twenty, who mutely demanded the pleasure of beating him
at tennis every afternoon. He was able in this way to
work off the depression that visited him daily with the
damp odor of London art, criticism, quite independently
of its bias toward himself. He told himself that he had
been let off fairly easily, though he winced considerably
under the adulation of the _Daily Mercury_, and found
himself breathing most freely when least was said about
him. The day of his triumph in the _Mercury_ he made
monstrous cowslip balls, and thought that the world had
never been sufficiently congratulated upon possessing
the ideal simplicity of children.
Thereafter for two days nothing came, and he began to
grow restless. Then the _Decade_ made its weekly slovenly
appearance, without a wrapper. He opened it with the
accumulated interest of forty-eight hours, turned to
"Fine Arts," and girded himself to receive the _Decade's_
ideas. He read the first sentence twice--the article
opened curiously, for the _Decade_.
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