"Do you know each other?"
"Do you know each other?"
"Do you know each other?"
Stella answered for her.
"Do I know Jean Fanshaw!" Sure of how matters stood between these two, sure also of her own rôle in the drama, she sprang from the chair and bestowed a Judas kiss upon Jean's frozen cheek. "Do I know her! Why we're regular old pals!"
Freed somehow from that loathsome touch, Jean stumbled to her desk. Patients came and went, the routine of the office ran its course; her share in the mechanism got itself mechanically performed; yet, whether she sped or welcomed, plied the cash-register, receipted bills, or soothed a nervous child, some spiteful goblin at the back of her brain was ever whispering the shameful tale which Stella was pouring out in that inner room. Those lies would be past Paul's forgetting, perhaps even past his forgiving, say what she might in defense. His look at Stella's kiss had been ghastly. What was he thinking now!
Then, when her agony of suspense seemed bearable no longer, came Stella, her pretense of friendship abandoned, her real vengeful self to the fore.
"I guess we're square," she bent to whisper, her face almost touching Jean's. "I guess we're square."
She vanished like the creature of nightmare she was, but the nightmare remained. Paul would demand his reckoning now. He would come and stand over her with his accusing face and ask her what this horror meant. She could not go to him, she felt, or at least unless he sent. But throughout that endless forenoon the dentist kept to his office, though twice there were intervals when she knew him to be alone. Her lunch hour—and his—came at last. She lingered, but still Paul delayed. At last, driven by an imperative craving to be done with it, she hurried to his room and found it empty. Grimes told her that he had seen Paul leave the place by a side door. The news was a dagger-thrust in her pride. Of a surety, now, he must seek her.
Between five o'clock and six, a dull hour, he came, woebegone and conciliatory.
"For God's sake, clear this up," he begged. "Haven't you anything to say?"
"A great deal, Paul. But first tell me what that woman said about me."
"You heard."
"But what else?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing!" The thing was incredible.
"Only that you'd probably be glad to explain things yourself."
At that half her burden fell. Stella's cunning had overreached itself. She had thought to rack her victim most by forcing her to betray herself, but she had reasoned from the false premise that Jean had a truly shameful past to conceal.
"Glad," she repeated. "Yes, I am glad. I should have told you some day, Paul. It's a long story."
The door opened to admit a caller with a swollen jowl.
"To-night, then?" said the dentist, hurriedly.
"Yes," she assented. "I will tell you to-night."
"At the flat?"
"Yes; at the flat."
Spurred on by her unrest, she reached the Lorna Doone before Paul had returned from his evening meal, and found the flat in darkness. She was relieved that this was so. It would give her a quiet interval in which to turn over what she meant to say. She entered the little parlor and seated herself in an open window where a shy midsummer-night's breeze, astray from river or sound, stole gently in and out and fingered her hair. It was wonderfully peaceful for a city. The sounds from below—the footsteps on the pavement, the cries of children at play under the young elms lining the avenue, the jests of the cigar-store loungers, the chatter of the girls thronging the soda-fountain at the corner druggist's, the jingle of bicycle bells, the beat of hoofs, the honk of occasional automobiles, even the strains of a hurdy-gurdy out-Heroding Sousa—one and all ascended, mellowed by distance to something not unmusical and cheerily human. She realized, as she listened, that the city, not the country, this city, this very corner, this hearth which she and Paul had prepared, was at last and truly home.
Presently she heard Paul's latch-key in the lock and his step in the dark corridor.
"You here?" he called tonelessly. "Better have a light, hadn't we?"
"It is cooler without," she answered. Even though her explanations need not fear the light, she thought obscurity might ease their telling.
With no other greeting, the dentist passed to the window opposite hers, slouched wearily into a chair, and waited in silence for her to begin.
Jean told her story in its fullness: her tomboy girlhood, the hateful family jars, the last quarrel with Amelia, her sentence to the refuge, her escape, return, riot-madness, and release, and the inner significance of her late struggle for a living against too heavy odds. She told it so honestly, so plainly, that she thought no sane being could misunderstand; yet, vaguely at first, with fatal clearness as, ending, she strained her eyes toward the dour shadowy figure opposite, she perceived that she had to deal with doubt.
"Do you think I am holding something back?" she faltered, after a long silence. "Must I swear that I've told you the whole truth?"
The man stirred in his place at last.
"I guess an affidavit won't be necessary," he returned grimly.
She endured another silence impatiently, then rose proudly to her feet.
"I'll say it for you," she flashed. "This frees you of any promises to me, Paul. You are as free as if you had never made them. Go your own way: I'll go mine. It—it can't be harder than the one I've come. Good-by."
He roused himself as she made to leave.
"Hold on, Jean," he said, coming closer. "I guess we can compromise this thing somehow."
"Compromise! I have nothing to compromise."
"Haven't you?" He laughed harshly. "I should say—but let that pass. Of course, after what's turned up, you can't expect a fellow to be so keen to marry—"
"I've told you that you are free," she interrupted.
"But I don't want to be free—altogether. We could be pretty snug here, Jean. The parson's rigmarole doesn't cut much ice with me, and I don't see that it need with you. They think downstairs we're married. That part's dead easy. As for Grimes and the rest—"
She had no impulse to strike him as she had the floor-walker. Waiting in his folly for an answer, the man heard only her stumbling flight along the corridor and the jar of a closing door.
XVIII
Yet, an hour later, Paul came seeking her at Mrs. St. Aubyn's, and, failing, returned in the morning before she breakfasted. Unsuccessful a second time, and then a third, he wrote twice, imploring her not to judge him by a moment's madness.
Jean made no reply. Moved by the eloquent memory of Paul's many kindnesses and with the charity she hoped of others for herself, she did him the justice to believe him better than his lowest impulse. But while she was willing to grant that the Paul who, in the first shock of her revelation, thought all the world rotten, was not the real Paul, she would not have been the woman she was, had his offense failed to bar him from her life. Her decision was instinctive and instant, requiring no travail of spirit, though she could not escape subsequent heart-searchings whether she had unwittingly laid herself open to humiliation and a scorching shame that the dentist, or any man, could even for a moment have held her so cheap.
Necessity turned her thoughts outward. The marriage plans had all but devoured her savings, and while she was clothed better than ever before, she lacked ready money for even a fortnight's board. Immediate employment was essential, yet, when canvassed, the things to which she might turn her hand were alarmingly few. After her experience with Meyer & Schwarzschild, she was loath to go back to her refuge-taught trade except as a last resort, while department-store life, as she had found it, seemed scarcely less repellent. At the outset it was her hope to secure somewhere a position like her last, but the advertisements yielded the name of only one dentist in need of an assistant, and this man had filled his vacancy before she applied. Thereafter she roamed the high seas of "Help Wanted: Female" without chart or compass.
The newspapers teemed with offers of work for women's hands. The caption "Domestic Service" of course removed a host of them from consideration, and the demand for stenographers, manicures, and like specialized wage-earners disposed of many others; but, these aside, opportunity still seemed to beckon from infinite directions. Thus, the paper-box industry clamored for girls to seam, strip, glue, turn in, top-label, close, and tie; the milliners wanted trimmers, improvers, frame-makers, and workers in plumage and artificial flowers; the manufacturers of shirt-waists and infants' wear called for feminine fingers to hemstitch, shirr, tuck, and press; deft needles might turn their skill toward every conceivable object from theatrical spangles to gas-mantles; nimble hands might dip chocolates, stamp decorated tin, gold-lay books, sort corks, tip silk umbrellas, curl ostrich feathers, fold circulars, and pack everything from Bibles to Turkish cigarettes.
But this prodigious demand, at first sight so promising, proved on close inspection to be limited. Beginners were either not wanted at all or, if taken on trial, were expected to subsist on charity or air. Experience was the great requisite. Day after day Jean toiled up murky staircases to confront this stumbling-block; day after day her resources dwindled.
Amy was keenly sympathetic and pored over the eye-straining advertisement columns as persistently as Jean herself.
"How's this?" she inquired, glancing up hopefully from one of these quests. "'Wanted: Girl or woman to interest herself in caring for the feeble-minded.'"
"I tried that yesterday."
"No good?"
"They only offered a home."
"And with idiots! They must be dotty themselves."
Then Jean, ranging another column, thought that she detected a glimmer of hope.
"Listen," she said. "'Wanted: Girl to pose for society illustrations.' Do you think there is anything in this?"
"Too much," returned Amy, sententiously. "Don't answer model ads. It isn't models those fellows want any more than they are artists. Real artists don't need to advertise. They can get all the models they want without it. I never thought to mention posing. Why don't you try it? You have got the looks, and it's perfectly respectable."
"Is it?" rejoined Jean, dubiously. "I thought this advertisement sounded all right because it says 'society illustrations.'"
"It's just as proper to pose nude, if that's what you're thinking about. I know the nicest kind of a girl who does. Her mother is paralyzed. But that's only one branch of the business, and it's all respectable. Why, you'll find art students themselves doing it to help along with their expenses. I know what I'm talking about, because I've posed."
"You!"
"Just a little. It was for an artist who boarded here a while before you came. He moved uptown when he began to get on, and now you see his pictures in all the magazines. I was a senator's daughter in one set of drawings and a golf-girl in a poster. It's easy work as soon as your muscles get broken in, and it stands you in fifty cents an hour at least. The girl I told you of sometimes makes twenty-five or thirty dollars a week, but she poses for life classes; they're in the schools, you know. I made up my mind to go into it once."
"Why didn't you?"
Amy laid a derisive finger on her tip-tilted nose.
"Here's why," she laughed. "It was this way: The artist who used to board here told me of another man who paid three or four models regular salaries. He did pictures about Greeks and Romans, and all those girls had to do, I heard, was to loaf round in pretty clothes, and once in awhile be painted. I went up there one day and it certainly was a lovely place, just like a house in a novel I'd read called 'The Last Days of Pompey-eye.' A girl was posing when I came, and, if you'll believe me, that man had rigged up a wind-machine that blew her clothes about just as though she was running a race. Well, I didn't stay long. The artist—he was seventy-five or eighty, I should say, and grumpy—turned me sideways, took one look at my nose, and said I was too old, nineteen hundred years too old! He thought he was funny. Somebody told me afterward that he was a has-been and couldn't sell his pictures any more."
With the idea that posing might answer as a stop-gap until she found some other means of support, Jean forthwith visited an agency whose address Amy furnished. She found the proprietor of this enterprise a jerky little man with a disquieting pair of black eyes which thoroughly inventoried her every feature, movement, and detail of dress.
"Chorus, front row, show-girl, or church choir?" he demanded briskly.
"I thought this was a model agency," Jean said; "I wish to try posing if—"
"Right shop. What line, please?"
"In costume."
"You don't follow me. Fashion-plate, illustrating, lithography, or commercial photography."
"I'm not sure," she hesitated, bewildered by this unexpected broadening of the field. "What can I earn?"
The little man waved his arms spasmodically.
"Might as well ask me what the weather'll be next Fourth of July," he sputtered. "See that horse there?" pointing out of his window at a much-blanketed thoroughbred on its way to the smith's. "How fast can he trot? You don't know! Of course you don't. How much can you earn? I don't know. Of course I don't. You see my point? Same case exactly. Illustrators pay all the way from half a dollar to a dollar and a half an hour. Camera-models make from one dollar to three. And there you are."
"I've had no experience."
"That's plain enough. Sticks out like a sore thumb. But you don't need any. Fact, you don't. That's the beauty of the business. Appearance and gumption, they're the cards to hold. You've got appearance. A girl has to have the looks, or I don't touch her fee. Fair all round, you see. If a girl's face or get-up is against her, I've no business taking her money. If an illustrator says, 'Send me up a model who looks so and so,' that's just the article he gets. First-class models, first-class illustrators, there's my system."
"I need work at once," Jean stated. "What is my chance?"
"Prime. You ought to fill the bill for a man who 'phoned not two minutes before you walked through the door. High-class artist, known everywhere, liberal pay. There needn't have been any delay whatever, if you'd thought to bring your father or mother along."
Jean's rising spirits dropped dismally at this remark.
"My father is dead," she explained. "My mother lives in the country."
"Then get her consent in writing. Means time, of course, and time's money, but it can't be helped."
"Is it absolutely necessary?"
"You'll have to have it to do business with me," replied the agent, beginning to shuffle among his papers.
"But my mother knows I am trying to earn a living," she argued. "Besides, I'm nearly of age. I shall be twenty-one next week."
"Drop in when you get your letter," directed the little man, inflexibly. "Minor or not, I make it a rule to have parents' consent. Troubles enough in my line without papa and mamma. Good day."
Outside the door Jean decided upon independent action. This last resource was at once too attractive and too near to be relinquished lightly. The idea of obtaining Mrs. Fanshaw's consent was preposterous, even if she could bring herself to ask it—the term "artist's model" conveyed only scandalous suggestions to Shawnee Springs; but there was nothing to prevent her hunting employment from studio to studio. Amy had mentioned the address of the illustrator whom success had translated from Mrs. St. Aubyn's world, and to him Jean determined to apply first.
Her errand brought her to one of the innumerable streets from which wealth and fashion are ever in retreat before a vanguard of the crafts of which wealth and fashion are the legitimate quarry, and to a commercialized brownstone dwelling with a modiste established in its basement, a picture-dealer tenanting its drawing-room, and a mixed population of artists, architects, and musicians tucked away elsewhere between first story and roof. She found the studio of Amy's acquaintance readily, and obeying a muffled call, which answered her knock, pushed open the door of an antechamber that had obviously once done service as a hall-bedroom. Here she hesitated. The one door other than that by which she entered led apparently into the intimacies of the artist's domestic life, for the counterpane of a white iron bed, distinctly visible from her station, outlined a woman's recumbent form.
"In here, please," called the voice. "I'm trying to finish while the light holds."
On the threshold Jean had to smile at her own unsophistication. The supposed bedroom was a detail of the studio proper, the supposed wife a model impersonating a hospital patient who held the centre of interest in a gouache drawing, to which the illustrator was adding a few last touches by way of accent.
"I see you don't need a model," Jean said, with a smile inclusive of the girl in the bed.
He scrutinized her impersonally, transferred a brush from mouth to hand, and caught up a bundle of galley-proofs.
"No," he decided, more to himself than Jean. "It's another petite heroine, drat her! But I'd be glad to have you leave your name and address," he added, indicating a paint-smeared memorandum book which lay amidst the brushes, ink-saucers, and color-tubes littering a small table at elbow. "I may need your type any day."
Jean complied, thanked him, and turned to go.
"Try MacGregor, top floor—Malcolm MacGregor," he suggested. "Tell him I said to have a look at your eyes."
Much encouraged, she mounted two more flights, knocked, and, as before, let herself in at an unceremonious hail. This time, however, she passed directly from hall to studio, coming at once into an atmosphere startling in its contrast to the life she left behind. MacGregor's Oasis, one of the illustrator's friends called it, and the phrase fitted happily. The rack of wonderfully chased small arms and long Arab flintlocks; the bright spot of color made upon the neutral background of the wall by some strange musical instrument or Tripolitan fan; the curious jugs, gourds, and leathern buckets of caravan housekeeping; the careless heaps of oriental stuffs and garments from which, among the soberer folds of a barracan or camel's-hair jellaba, one caught the red gleam of a fez or the yellow glow of a vest wrought with intricate embroideries; the tropical sun-helmet,—MacGregor's own,—its green lining bleached by the reflected light of Sahara sand; the antelope antlers above the lintel; the Soudanese leopard skins under foot—these and their like, in bewildering number and variety, recalled the charm and mystery of the African desert which this man knew, loved, and painted superlatively.
MacGregor himself, whom she found at his easel, was, despite his name, not Scotch, but American, with seven generations of New England ancestors behind him. Tall, thin-featured, alert, and apparently in his late thirties, he had the quizzical, shrewdly humorous eye which passes for and possibly does express the Connecticut Yankee's outlook upon life. In nothing did he suggest the artist.
"I'll be through here in no time, if you'll take a chair," he said, when Jean had repeated the other artist's message.
Her wait was fruitful, for it emphasized most graphically the dictum of the agent that gumption was fundamental in the successful model's equipment. The man now posing for MacGregor in the character of an aged Arab leading a caravan down a rocky defile, was mounted upon nothing more spirited than an ingenious arrangement of packing-cases, but he bestrode his saddle as if he rode in truth the barb which the canvas depicted. He dismounted presently and disappeared in an adjacent alcove from which he shortly issued a commonplace young man in commonplace occidental garb, who pocketed his day's wage and went whistling down the stairs.
MacGregor turned to Jean.
"I do want a model," he said. "I want one bad. By rights I should be painting over yonder,"—his gesture broadly signified Africa,—"but my market, the devil take it! is here. So I'm hunting a model. I have had plenty come who look the part (which you don't) even Arabs from a Wild West show; but I've yet to strike one who has any more imagination than a rabbit. I tell you this frankly because it's easy to see you're not the average model. That is why I asked you to wait. The model I'm looking for must work under certain of the Arab woman's restrictions. Out there"—his hand again swept the Dark Continent—"you never see her face, as you probably know. You glimpse her eyes, if they're not veiled; you try to read their story. If even the eyes are hidden, you find yourself attempting to read the draperies. Do you grasp my difficulty? I want some one who can express emotions not only with the eyes, but without them. Now you," he ended, with a note of enthusiasm, "you have the eyes. Don't tell me you haven't the rest."
Jean laughed.
"I won't if I can help it," she assured him.
He caught up a costume which lay upon a low divan, and ransacked a heap of unframed canvases that leaned backs outward against the wall.
"This sketch will give you a notion how the dress goes," he said, and carried his armful into the alcove.
When she reëntered the studio, MacGregor was arranging a screen of a pattern Jean had never seen.
"It was made from an old lattice," he explained, placing a chair for her behind it. "I picked it up in Kairwan. This little door swings in its original position. You are looking now from a window—a little more than ajar, so—from which generations of women, dressed as you are dressed, have watched an Arab street."
He passed round to the front of the screen and studied her intently.
"Eyes about there," he said, indicating a rose-water jar upon a low shelf. "Expression," he paused thoughtfully. "How shall I tell you what I want you to suggest from the lattice? Don't think of those women of the Orient. You can't truly conceive their life. Think of something nearer home. Imagine yourself in a convent—no, that won't do at all. Imagine yourself a prisoner, an innocent prisoner, peering through your grating at the world, longing—"
"Wait," said Jean.
She threw herself into his conception, closed her mental vision upon the studio and its trophies, erased the bustling city from her thoughts. She was again a resentful inmate of Cottage No. 6, lying in her cell-like room at twilight, while the woods called to her with a hundred tongues. There were flowers in the sheltered places; arbutus, violets—
"You've got it!" MacGregor's exultant voice brought her back. "You've got it! We'll go to work to-morrow at nine."
"No admission, Mac?" asked a man's voice from the doorway. "I gave the regulation knock, but you seemed—" He stopped and gazed hard into the eyes which met his with answering wonder from the lattice.
"I've found her, Atwood," MacGregor hailed him jubilantly. "I've found her at last."
The newcomer took an uncertain step forward, halted again, then strode suddenly toward the screen.
"I think I have, too," he said, at the little window now. "It's Jack, isn't it?"
XIX
And Jean?
It was as if she still dwelt in fancy in that unforgettable past. She had burst her bars; she had come, a fugitive, to the birch-edged shore of a lonely lake; her knight of the forest stood before her.
Her knight of the forest stood before her.
Her knight of the forest stood before her.
Her knight of the forest stood before her.
The astonished MacGregor, having waited a decent interval for some rational clew to the situation, recalled his own existence by the simple expedient of folding the screen.
"Step inside, won't you?" he invited with a dry grin. "You may take cold at the window."
Atwood turned an illumined face.
"It's been years since we met," he explained. "I was not sure at first—the costume, the place."
MacGregor's eye lingered upon him in humorous meditation.
"Perhaps you'll see your way in time to introduce me," he suggested. "This has been a business session, so far. We hadn't come to names."
The younger man floundered, glowing healthily, but Jean retained her wits.
"Miss Fanshaw," she supplied promptly. "I should have mentioned it before."
She vanished into the alcove, questioned her unfamiliar image in the little mirror, and began to resume her street-dress with fingers not under perfect control. There came an indistinct murmur of talk from the studio in which MacGregor's incisive tones predominated. His companion's responses were few and low. When she reëntered, Atwood stood waiting by the outer door.
"At nine, then," reminded MacGregor. "So-long, Craig, if you must go."
"So-long," answered the other, absently.
On the stair they faced each other with the wonder of their meeting still upon them.
"You are not a professional model," he said; "I should have come across you before, if you were."
"You have seen me get my first engagement."
"And with MacGregor! Was it chance?"
"Just chance."
"Jove!" he ejaculated. "It might have been myself. Yet it's strange enough as it is. MacGregor in there was the chap I was to camp with, you remember? The man whose grandmother—"
"Great-grandmother, wasn't it?" she smiled.
"You do remember!"
A silence fell upon them for a little moment and they assayed each other shyly, he keenly aware of the fuller curves which had made a woman of her, she searching rather for reminders of the youth whose image had gone back with her through the gatehouse into bondage. He was more grave, as became a man now looking back upon his golden twenties, with thoughtful lines about the eyes, and a clearer demarcation of the jaw, which was, as of old, shaven, and pale with the pallor of a dweller in cities. The mouth was the mouth of the youth, sensitive, unspoiled; and the direct eyes had lost nothing of their friendliness, though she divined that he weighed her, questioning what manner of woman she had become.
"You went back," he broke the pause, "you went back to that inferno because of what I said. You saw it through. Plucky Jack!"
"Jean," she corrected.
"Why?"
"Jack was another girl, a girl I hope I've outgrown."
"Don't say that," he protested. "I knew her. But this Jean of the staircase—"
"Well?" she challenged, avid for his mature opinion.
"Makes me wonder," he completed, "whether I've not been outgrown, too."
It was not a satisfying answer. She remembered that growth may be other than benign.
"You!" she said.
"Why not? I was young, preposterously young. Had I been older, I should never have dared meddle with your life."
"Meddle!" she repeated, his self-reproach rang so true; "you gave me the wisest advice such a girl could receive. That girl could not appreciate how wise it was, but this one does and thanks you from the bottom of her heart."
Atwood drew a long breath.
"You can say that!" he exclaimed. "You knew what it meant to return; I did not. Since I have realized the truth, the thought of my folly has given me no peace. I imagined—God knows what I haven't imagined! To see you here, as you are; to have you thank me, when I thought I deserved your undying hate, is like a reprieve."
Jean's face went radiant. "Yet you say you knew her!"
Their eyes met an instant; then they laughed together happily.
"You're right," he acknowledged. "It seems I don't know either of you. But we can't talk here, can we? We need—" He paused, then, "Give me this day," he entreated. "We're not strangers. Say you will!"
As they issued upon the pavement, the driver of a passing cab raised an interrogative whip. Atwood nodded, and a moment afterward they had edged into the traffic of one of the avenues and were rolling northward. To Jean, reveling silently in her first hansom, it seemed that they had scarcely started before they turned in at one of the entrances of Central Park, and for a time followed perforce the flashing afternoon parade before striking into a less frequented roadway, where they dismounted. Atwood, too, had said nothing amidst the jingling ostentation of the avenue and main-traveled drives, and he was silent now as they forsook the asphalt walks for quiet paths, where their feet trod the good earth, and the odor of leaf mold rose pungently.
Presently he halted.
"Will you shut your eyes for a little way?" he asked. "It's my whim."
She assented, and they went forward slowly, her hand upon his sleeve. She felt the path drop, by gentle slopes at first, then with sharp turns past jutting rocks, where there seemed no path at all. Her sense of direction failed her, and with it went her recollection of the city's nearness. The immediate sounds were all sylvan. She heard the call of a cat-bird, the bark of a squirrel, the laughing whimper of a brook among stones, which she guessed, if her ear had not lost its woodcraft, merged its peevish identity in some neighboring lake or pool.
"Now," said her guide, pausing.
She looked, started, and rounded swiftly upon Atwood to find him beaming at her instant comprehension.
"It might be the very same!" she exclaimed.
"Mightn't it? The birches, the shore-line—"
"And the stream, even the little stream! Could I find watercressthere, I wonder?"
The man laughed.
"Ah, it is real to you! I, too, forgot New York when I first stumbled on it. I evenlookedfor watercress. But it knows no such purity, poor little brook! I've had to pretend with it, as I've pretended with the lake. The landscape-gardener was a clever fellow. He makes you believe there are distances out there—winding channels, unplumbed depths; he cheats you into thinking you have a forest at your back. Sometimes he has almost persuaded me to cast a clumsy line into that thicket yonder."
Jean's look returned to him quickly. He was smiling, but with an undercurrent of gravity.
"You know it well," she said.
"I ought. It was here, the summer after we met, that I came to realize something of what I had asked you to do. I began to study refuges. I went to such as I could, boys' places, mainly; I even tried to get sight or word of you. Somehow, though, I never came at the right official, and it seemed that men weren't welcome. I learned a few things, however. I grubbed among reports; I found out what your daily life was like, what your companions must be, and once I saw a newspaper account of a riot. But of you I heard nothing. How could I? I did not even know your name—I, your judge!"
The girl moved toward the border of the lake and for a space stood looking dreamily into its tranquil counterfeit of changing foliage and September sky. To the miracle of their meeting was added the revelation that even as he had filled her thoughts in the dark days, so had she possessed his.
"Will you sit here?" he asked, again beside her. "I want to hear the whole story—the story which began back among the other birches."
"It began farther back than there."
"Not for me."
"But it should. If you thought about me at all, you must have wondered how I came to be in a refuge uniform."
"I wondered, yes; but I never really cared. I could see with my own eyes what you were."
She searched his face with the skepticism which the world had taught, then, with a swift intake of breath, looked believing away.
"We must begin at the beginning," she said.
She told him her story as she had told it to the dentist that hideous night of explanations at the Lorna Doone, but where Paul's black silence had stifled her, lamed her speech, made her almost doubt herself, this listener's faith leaped before her words, bridged the difficult places where she faltered, spread the cloak of chivalry in the miry way. Yet, with all his sympathy, it hurt her, so senseless always seemed the reckoning for her follies, so poignant were her regrets, and once, when she began to speak of Stella and the riot, he stopped her.
"Don't go on," he begged. "I see what it costs you."
"I'd rather you heard it all," she replied. "It's your due."
Nevertheless, she did not tell him all. She could speak of Stella, of Amy, of young Meyer, of the floor-walker, but no word of Paul passed her lips. She let Atwood infer that the stigma of the refuge had driven her from Grimes's employ, as it had thrust her from the department store. The whole chain of circumstances which the dentist's name connoted had become suddenly as inexplicable to herself as to this transcendent hero of a perfect day.
The sun was low when she made an end, and the long-drawn shadows of the birches in the lake turned their thoughts again to that other sundown.
"You were a lonely little figure as I looked back," he said. "I took that picture with me through the hills, and it remained my sharpest memory. It was a sad memory, a mute reproach, like the poor things I bought for you to wear."
"Then you did get them!" she cried, her dress instinct astir. "What were they like?"
"I will show them to you some day."
"You've kept them? I must pay my debt."
He shook his head. "They're not for sale. You shall see them when you come to my studio."
"You are an artist, too?"
"I paint," he replied simply. "When you are not busy with MacGregor, you will find work with me. We'll arrange that among us. Old Mac little dreams our secret."
"It is a secret?"
"With me, at any rate. I've never told. You see"—he looked away with a sudden diffidence almost boyish; then back again with a temerity that was boyish, too—"you see, I was jealous of my memories. I wanted to keep them wholly to myself. Our meeting was—how shall I say it?—a kind of idyl. And you—have you told?"
"Never."
"Was it partly for my reason?"
"Yes," she answered; "partly for your reason."
"But those clothes," he said, after a moment, "you'll smile when you see them. I've tried many a time to imagine you wearing them, braving the world as you planned so stoutly. Perhaps it would have been no harder than the other way. Perhaps—but that's over with, thank heaven! You've earned your freedom and have a brighter lot than a fugitive's to face. I don't mean a model's life. That will be temporary. There's something in you, something fine that only needs its chance. I can't tell you how I know this any more than I can tell you what it is, but I believe in it as I believe in my own existence. I know it's true, as true as the fact that we stand here face to face."
By some necromancy of the mind he mirrored back her own vague hopes.
"But I am a woman," she said, eager for more.
"So much the better. You live in woman's day. But don't forget that you have given me a part of it," he added, as she rose. "My own particular solar day isn't ended yet. When we first met, you had me to luncheon, or was it breakfast? I'm going to return the courtesy."
"But—"
"You couldn't be more appropriately dressed for a park restaurant," he cut in, pursuing her glance. "They'll serve us under an arbor where the wistaria blooms in May. We'll have to pretend about the wistaria, but it ought to be easy. The great pretense has come true."
XX
She learned from MacGregor what Atwood's modest "I paint" signified.
"He is an illustrator who illustrates," he told her their first day, while they worked. "I mean—left arm a trifle higher, please; you've shifted the pose—I mean he gets into the skin of a writer's characters, when they have any. If they're mere abstractions, he creates blood, bones, and epidermis for them outright. Rarer thing than you imagine, I dare say, in spite of the newspaper jokes. You can count the men on one hand who do it here in New York, and to my mind Craig deserves the index finger. He'd find a soul for a rag doll. But I'm only telling you what any top-notch magazine you pick up says more forcibly."
Jean cloaked her ignorance in silence and put her trust in MacGregor's enthusiasm for further light. After an industrious interval it came.
"But that isn't all," he added, tilting back to study his canvas through half-shut eyes. "The public doesn't know Atwood's truemetier. He's bigger than they think. I'll show you something in a minute. It's time for rest."
He lingered for a brush stroke, which at one sweep filled a languid fold of drapery with action, and then crossed the studio to the stack of unfinished work beside the wall.
"Wait," he warned, placing a canvas in the trial frame and wheeling an easel tentatively. "It's in the rough, but we can give it light and a setting. Now look. That's what I call portraiture."
Even her unschooled eye perceived its strength. It was MacGregor who looked out at her, MacGregor as she herself had twice seen him that day with his working fit upon him, New York forgotten, Africa filling every thought.
"And Mr. Atwood did it?"
"Nobody else. He sat over there in that corner, while I worked in mine, and painted what he saw."
"It's a wonderful likeness."
"Likeness!" MacGregor shook the poor word contemptuously. "Likeness! Child, it's divination!"
He dismissed her early in the afternoon, for it was raining fitfully and the light was uncertain, and on leaving she turned her steps toward the Astor Library, intent on a purpose inspired by MacGregor's talk. She had some acquaintance with the lending libraries, but none with this sedate edifice whose size and gloom oppressed her as she looked vainly about for her elderly fellow-boarder who spent his life somewhere amidst its dinginess. In this quandary, she was spied by a mannered attendant whose young face, framed in obsolete side-whiskers, reminded her of certain middle-Victorian bucks of Thackeray's whom she had come to know during spare moments at the dental parlors. This guide led her into a large reading-room where he assured her ladies were welcome, despite the frowns of the predominant sex whose peace they ruffled, and found her the two or three illustrated periodicals she named.
Without exception these contained Atwood's work, a fact which impressed her tremendously; and without exception they bore testimony to his superiority as emphatically as MacGregor. She pored over these drawings one by one, weighing them much as she weighed his spoken thought, and judging them, no less than his speech, most candid mirrors of his personality. In what this personality's appeal consisted, she had neither the detachment nor the wish to define; she could only uncritically feel its sincerity, its romance, and its power.
She craved a fuller knowledge, however, than these mute witnesses could give, and the desire presently drew her back into the high-vaulted chamber where the library's activities seemed to focus; and here, bewildered by the riches of the card catalogue, she was luckily seen by the quiet old man who lent his dignity to the head of Mrs. St. Aubyn's table. He smiled gently upon her over his spectacles, pondering the motive behind her request as he had speculated about the motives of thousands before her, and instantly, out of a head whose store she felt that she had scantily appreciated, produced half a dozen likely references which he straightway bade a precocious small boy to track to their fastnesses in some mysterious region he called the stacks; himself, meanwhile, with a faded gallantry, escorting her to a desk in a scholarly retreat where only feminine glances questioned her coming.
So ensconced, she came upon the facts she sought in a bound volume of a journal devoted chiefly to the fine arts. She learned here that her knight errant's full name was Francis Craig Atwood, that New York claimed the honor of his birthplace, and that he was a trifle less than ten years older than herself. There followed a list of his schools, which ended with Julien's Academy in Paris, where it appeared he had gone the autumn after their meeting, and had exhibited canvases at the Salons of two successive years. His return to America and his instant recognition coincided closely with her own coming to New York. The concluding analysis of his work bristled with technicalities, but she read into it the qualities which she perceived or imagined in the man, and, staring into the dusty alcove over against her seat, lost herself in a brown study of what such success as this probably meant to him. Newspaper paragraphs about his comings and goings, she supposed, many sketches like this under her hand, social opportunities of course, the flattery of women, friendships with the clever and the rich. It rather daunted her to find him a celebrity, and at this pass nothing could have so routed her self-possession as to discover that a man, of whose nearness at an adjacent bookcase she had been vaguely aware, was no other than Atwood himself.
"Thank you," he laughed, with a wave of the hand toward the telltale page. "But there's better reading in the library."
Jean clapped to the offending volume and blushed her guiltiest.
"You must think me very silly," she stammered. "Mr. MacGregor praised your work, showed me the portrait—"
"Of course he did. You have discovered Mac's weakness and his dangerous charm. He believes all his friends are geniuses. You'll grow as conceited as the rest of us in time."
"And have the other conceited friends done work like yours and said nothing about it?" she asked.
"A thousand times better. You've no idea what a clever lot of men and women Mac knows." He rapidly instanced several artists, sculptors, and writers of prominence, adding: "But you will see them all at The Oasis sooner or later. You've probably noticed that Mac is one of those rareties who can talk while they work. What would hinder most people, only stimulates him. And it stimulates the other fellow, too. I always drop in on him for a tonic when my own stuff lags. I was there this afternoon, in fact, though for another reason. I wanted to see you. It must have been telepathy that brought me down here; I thought it was 'The Gadzooks'!"
"'The Gadzooks,'" she puzzled.
"Merely my slang for the Revolutionary romance," he explained. "I'm illustrating still another one, and ran in here to resolve my doubts about bag-wigs. My novelist seems to have invented a new variety. But about you: if you don't mind the weather, and have nothing better to do, I should like to take you over to a Fifth Avenue picture dealer's to see a so-called Velasquez that's come into the market."
Jean absorbed more than the true rank and value of Velasquez's portraiture. Wet or dry, the weather was irreproachable. Did it rain, there were yet other picture dealers' secluded galleries where one might loiter luxuriously; while for the intervals of sunshine the no less fascinating shop-windows awaited, each a glimpse into the wonderland of Europe, which her guide seemed to know so well. They even discussed going on to the Metropolitan to look in at a Frans Hals and a Rembrandt, which the talk of Velasquez suggested, but Atwood's absurd watch, corroborated by several equally ridiculous clocks of the neighborhood, said plainly that it was well past closing time at the museum and indeed quite the day's end here among the shops.
He was loath to let her go.
"It's been like a too short trip abroad," he said. "I hate to book for home just yet. Why can't we dine as we did last night?"
She shook her head.
"Yesterday was an occasion."
"Say Italy?" he persisted. "We've skimmed England, France, the Low Countries; why not Italy? I know a little place that's as Italian as Naples. You would never guess its existence. It looks like every other brownstone horror outside, with not a hint of its real business, for they say old Gaetano Sanfratello has no license. He looks you over through the basement grating, and, if you're found worthy, leads you through a tunnel of a hallway into the most wonderful kitchen you ever saw. It's as clean as clean and is a regular treasure-house of shining copper. Then you'll find yourself out in what prosaic New York calls a back yard, but which, in fact, is a trattoria in the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel, whose lithograph you will see above the door. There are clusters of ripening grapes in the trellis overhead, and Chianti or Capri antico—real Capri—on the cloth below; and they'll serve you such artichoke soups, cheese soufflés, and reincarnations of the chestnut, as the gods eat! And Gaetano's pretty daughter will wait upon us and sing 'Bella Napoli,' and perhaps, if we're in great luck, she'll let us have a peep at her bambino which she keeps swaddled precisely like the one in that copy of Luca della Robbia you are staring at this minute. Aren't you tempted?"
She was, but resisted successfully; and when he saw that she was inflexible, he walked with her to her own street, planning other holidays of a future which should know no shadows.
"You must forget that gray time you've left behind you," he declared. "Call this your real beginning—your rebirth, your renaissance."
So in truth it was. The weeks following were weeks of rapid growth and ripening, which, Atwood's influence admitted, yet found their compelling force in the girl's own will. The ambition to do her utmost for MacGregor, to learn what books could teach of the life he knew by living, took her back repeatedly to the library; then other suggestions of the studio, which, even at its narrowest, was a school of curious knowledge about common things that few, save the artist, seemed to see as they were. Who but he, for instance, stopped to consider that sunlight filtering through leaves fell in circles; that shadows were violet, not black; that tobacco smoke from the mouth was of another color than the graceful spiral which rose from the tip of a cigarette? But this field opened into innumerable others in the wide domain where her two friends plied their differing talents; while these, in turn, marched with the boundaries of others still, whose only limits were Humanity's. Life itself set the true horizon to MacGregor's Oasis.
Among MacGregor's intimates who shared the secret of a knock which admitted them at all hours, but who, busy men themselves, came oftenest after the north light failed, was a sculptor named Karl Richter. This man's specialty was the American Indian, but he also had known the Arab at first-hand, and Africa in one or another of its myriad phases was ever the topic when he and MacGregor foregathered. Listening to their talk, Jean came to visualize the bronze-skinned folk, the vivid market-places, the wild music of hautboys and tom-toms, the gardens of fig and olive and orange and palm, the waysides thicketed with bamboo, tamarisk, or scarlet geranium, and the desert,—above all, the mysterious, terrible, beautiful desert,—as things which her own senses had known. It chanced one day that they spoke of camels and, as often, began to argue; and that Richter, to prove his point, whipped from his pocket a lump of modeling wax, which, under his wonderful fingers, became in a twinkling a striking counterfeit of the beast itself. It could not have been more than an inch in height, but it was a very camel, stubborn, complaining, alive. MacGregor confuted, the sculptor annihilated the little animal with a careless pinch, tossed the wax aside, and soon after went his way.
Dissatisfied with his work, MacGregor presently caught his canvas from the easel, and, laying it prone upon the floor, began by shifting strips of card-board to hunt the truer composition. Jean, left to herself, took up the discarded wax, tried vainly to coax back the vanished camel, and then amused herself with a conception of her own. So absorbed did she become that MacGregor finished his experiments unheeded, and, receiving no answer to a question, still unregarded came and peered over her shoulder.
"Great Jupiter Pluvius!" he exclaimed.
Jean whirled about.
"How you startled me!" she said.
"It's nothing to the way you've startled me. Where did you see that head you've modeled?"
"Oh, this?" She tried to put the wax away. "It's nothing—only a baby in our block."
MacGregor pounced upon the model and bore it to the light.
"Nothing! Merely a study from life, that's all! Just a trifle thrown off in your odd moments!" He turned the little head round and round, showering exclamations. "Who taught you?" he demanded, striding back. "Somebody had a finger in it besides you. There are lines here that can't be purely intuitive."
"I used to watch my father."
"Was he a sculptor?"
"He might have been, if he'd had the chance. But he had to work at other things, and he married—"
"I know, I know," MacGregor groaned. "Love in a cottage and to hell with art! But he couldn't keep his thoughts or his hands from it. He modeled when he could?"
Jean nodded dreamily.
"Sundays, mainly," she answered. "We used to go into the country together. He found a bed of good clay near a creek where the mint grew. I can never smell mint without remembering. I couldn't go back there after he died."
MacGregor gave her a sidelong glance, hemmed, made an unnecessary trip across the studio, and kicked a fallen burnous violently.
"But you went on modeling?" he asked, returning.
"Yes—by and by. Then, later, I stopped."
"Why?"
"I—I hadn't the clay?" she evaded.
MacGregor brooded over her handiwork a moment longer, then squared his jaw.
"You'll have the 'clay' hereafter," he said.
XXI
At the outset she was rather skeptical of his faith in her. Had not Atwood said that MacGregor saw genius in all his friends? But the younger man now hailed him a most discerning judge.
"It's the something I divined," he declared jubilantly, "the gold-bearing vein I believed in, but hadn't the luck to unearth. Now to develop it! What does Mac advise?"
"One of the art schools," said Jean. "I can go evenings, it seems."
"And work days! It's a stiff programme you plan."
"But the school won't mean work," she declared. "Then, too, the posing comes far easier than it did. Mr. MacGregor says my muscles are almost as steady as a professional's."
"So he tells me. I'm going to insist on sharing your time. He has monopolized you long enough."
MacGregor's monopoly did not cease at once, however. His first step on discovering Jean's talent was to enlist Richter's expert criticism and counsel with the practical outcome that the sculptor's door swung open to her in the daylight hours when MacGregor worked with male models. The clay-modeling-room at the art school was a wonderful place. Its casts, its tools, its methods, were a revelation after the crude shifts with which her father had had to content himself; but Richter's studio transcended it as a university transcends a kindergarten. Here were conceived ideas which found perpetuity in bronze!
Studio and sculptor were each unique. A little man of crippled frame, Karl Richter delighted in the muscular and the colossal and walked a pigmy amidst his own creations. Michael Angelo was his god; but his manner was his own, and the Indians and cow-boys he loved best to express were remote enough from the great Florentine's subjects to acquit him of imitation. His frail physique notwithstanding, he had been at pains to see for himself the primitive life he adored, and the idler who coined "The Oasis" dubbed the sculptor's place "The Wigwam," and spread a facetious tale that Richter went about his work in blanket and moccasins, and habitually smoked a calumet which had once belonged to Sitting Bull. Richter never denied this myth, which by now had received the sanction of print, and took huge satisfaction in the crestfallen glances unknown callers gave his conventional dress. However, the studio itself, a transformed stable, was sufficiently picturesque. It overflowed with spoils from ranch and tepee, and, thanks to the Wild West show which furnished MacGregor occasional Arabs, sometimes sheltered genuine, if sophisticated, red men.
About this time Jean left Mrs. St. Aubyn's, whose neighborhood Paul, after dejected silence, had again begun to haunt. She had thus far eluded him, but meet they must, she felt, if she remained; and with Amy's abrupt departure, which now came to pass, she changed to a boarding-house of Atwood's recommending in Irving Place.
"There are no signs of the trade about it, fashionable or unfashionable," he said. "It's just a homelike place, neither too large nor too small, where you will see mainly art students. Many of them, like you, are making their own way, and all of them are dead in earnest. All the illustrators know Mrs. Saunders. Half of us have lived under her roof some time or other."
"You, too!"
He smiled at her tone.
"I wasn't born with a golden spoon, you know. Some New Yorkers aren't. I inherited a little money, but I'm not a plutocrat yet, even if editors do smile upon me. Julie and I thoroughly mastered the gentle art of scrimping at one time. Have I ever mentioned my sister, Mrs. Van Ostade?"
"You spoke of her the day I saw you first."
"At the birches?" he returned, surprised.
"You said she would not understand."
His eyes sobered.
"I remember," he said. "And it was true. Neither would she understand now, I fear. She has been both wedded and widowed since. You'll see her at the studio yet, if MacGregor ever lets us begin work together. She surprises me there when she thinks I am neglecting my duties as a social being. Julie has all the zeal of a proselyte in her missionary labors for society," he added laughingly. "She married into one of the old Dutch families."
Jean found that a tradition of Mrs. Van Ostade's residence in Irving Place still lingered there. She was spoken of as Craig Atwood's sister, the clever girl who had jockied for position, on nothing a year, by cultivating fashionable charities. Settlement work, it appeared, had been the fulcrum for her lever. No one here, however, had known her personally, save Mrs. Saunders, who was a paragon of reticence when gossip was afield. Indeed, a dearth of gossip, in the invidious sense of the word, was a negative virtue to which her whole establishment might lay claim. Mainly art students, as Atwood had predicted, the sharpest personalities of Jean's new acquaintances dealt with the vagaries of masters whom they furtively admired and not seldom aped. Thus the life-class girl would furrow her pretty forehead over the drawing of a beginner at antique with the precise "Ha!" and "Not half bad!" of the distinguished artist and critic who twice a week set her own heart palpitating with his crisp condemnation or praise.
Illustrating, painting, sculpture, architecture, decorative design, whatever their individual choice, life for each had its center in the particular school of his or her adhesion. Art—always Art—was the beginning and end of their table-talk, and even the two young men who had other interests, a lawyer and a playwright, both embryonic, spoke the language of the studios. To this community of interest was added the discovery that all derived from country stock. Half a dozen states had their nominal allegiance, and not even Mrs. Saunders, who seemed as metropolitan as the City Hall, could boast New York as her birthplace. They brimmed with a fine youthful confidence in their ability to wrest success from this alien land of promise, which charged their atmosphere electrically and spurred Jean's already abundant energy to tireless endeavor. Her days were all too short, and Atwood, whose invitations she repeatedly refused for her art's sake, began to caution her against overwork.
"Philosophic frivolity, as my sister calls it, has its uses," he said. "I usually agree with her social preachments, even if I don't observe them very faithfully. You must know Julie. I'll ask her to call."
Whether he did so or not, Jean was unaware. At all events, Mrs. Van Ostade did not renew her acquaintance with Irving Place, nor did Atwood broach the subject again. If the social columns might be believed, the lady was amply preoccupied with philosophic frivolity. MacGregor presently turned a searching light upon her personality.
"Notice that bit of impertinent detail, the unnecessary jewel?" he queried, stabbing with his pipe-stem at one of Atwood's drawings which a premature Christmas magazine had reproduced in color. "Craig never did it."
"Then who did?" Jean asked.
"His sister."
"Does she draw?"
"By proxy. I mean she suggested this as she has suggested every false, vitiating note that's crept into his work. Left to himself, Craig never paints the lily. But he defers to her as a younger brother often will to a sister who has mothered or stepmothered him. It was probably a good thing once—I admit she has brains and push; but now it's time the coddling stopped. It did let up for a while when she went over to the Dutch—she was too busy to bother with him; but with her husband underground and Craig coming on, it has begun again. Artistically she's his evil genius. Of course he can't see it, or won't. I've done my level best to beat it into him."
"You have told him!"
"Certainly; and her too. I have known them both for years. What are you grinning at?"
"Your candor. What did he say?"
MacGregor scowled.
"Same old rot I'm always hearing," he grumbled. "Called me a woman-hater. What do you think?" challenging her abruptly. "You've seen me at close quarters for some time. Do I strike you as that sort of man? I want your unvarnished opinion."
Jean answered him with his own frankness.
"A woman-hater?" she repeated. "Never. I think you are"—she searched for the word—"a woman-idolater."
MacGregor grimly assured himself that no sarcasm was intended.
"Expound," he directed.
"I mean it seems to me you rate Woman so high that mere women can't realize your ideal."
"Humph!" he commented ungraciously. "Where did you learn to turn cheap epigrams? Probably it's an echo of something you've read."
He addressed her variously as Miss Epigrams, Lady Blessington, and Madame de Staël as the work went forward, always with profound gravity, until finally, when he saw her color rise to his teasing, he gave his full-lunged laugh and confessed.
"All the same, you're right, Miss Epigrams. That's one reason why I'm still unattached. It's also why I haven't cared to see Craig take the only sure cure. A wife would teach his sister her place, if she had the right metal." He chuckled at the vision his words conjured. "But it would be a battle royal."
It was spring before Jean herself saw Mrs. Van Ostade. She had posed for Atwood frequently after Christmas, but had chanced always to be either with MacGregor or Richter when his sister visited the studio, until the April afternoon when Julie's knock interrupted an overdue illustration which Atwood was toiling mightily to finish. He frowned at the summons and answered it without putting down the maul-stick, palette, and brushes with which his hands were cumbered; but his "You, Julie!" at the door hinted no impatience, nor his returning step aught but infinite leisure as he issued with his dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned caller from behind the screen.
"Those stairs!" sighed the lady. Then, observing Jean, she subjected her to a drastic ordeal by lorgnon, which, raking her from face to gown,—where the inquisition lingered,—returned with added intensity upon her face.
Hot plowshares could have been no more fiery for poor Jean, who, sufficiently aglow with the knowledge that the dress upon her back was a piece of Mrs. Van Ostade's evening finery abandoned to the uses of the studio, found herself tormented by the certainty that somewhere in her vulnerable past she and this sister of Craig Atwood's had met before.
A sympathetic reflection of her embarrassment lit the man's face.
"This is Miss Fanshaw," he interposed, "herself an artist. You have heard me speak of her, Julie."
The lorgnon dropped and the two women exchanged a bow perceptible to the naked eye.
"I know the face," stated Mrs. Van Ostade, with an impersonal air of classifying scientific phenomena. "Where did I see it?"
Jean now recalled this elusive detail most vividly, but she kept her head.
"Probably in Mr. Atwood's work," she suggested coldly.
"Of course," seconded Atwood, keen to end the incident. "You will find Miss Fanshaw in half my recent stuff."
"The living face has no pictorial associations whatever," retorted his sister, with decision. "I shall remember in time. But go on with your work, Craig. I did not come to disturb you—merely to bring a piece of news which I'll tell you as soon as I get my breath."
Atwood placed a chair and, returning to his easel, made a show of work which Jean's trained eye knew for his usual polite pretense with visitors who assumed themselves no hindrance; while Mrs. Van Ostade, throwing back her furs, relegated the model to the ranks of the inanimate studio properties, of which her leisured survey now took stock.
"Those stairs!" she said again, pursuing her breath by the unique method of lavishing more. "Really, Craig, you couldn't have pitched on a more inconvenient rookery."
"We thought it a miracle for the money once," he reminded. "I dare say I could find a more convenient workshop in one of the new office-buildings, but then I shouldn't have my open fire."
"You could have it at the Copley Studios, and modern comforts, too."
"Up there!" he scoffed. "I don't belong in the pink-tea circle, Julie."
Mrs. Van Ostade refused to smile with him.
"The location counts," she insisted.
"With some people."
"With the helpful people. I've thought it over carefully; I've used my eyes and ears. The studio unquestionably carries weight. It ought to be something more than a workshop, as you call it. It should have atmosphere. Even our friend down the street has achieved that. Barbaric as it is, MacGregor's studio has a distinct artistic unity."
"Mac's place reflects his work. So does mine."
"Yours! It's a jumble of everything, a junk-shop."
"Of course it is," he laughed. "I've ransacked two-thirds of these treasures from the Ghetto. But even junk-shops have atmosphere—a musty one—and so, it logically follows, must my studio."
She indulged his trifling with a divine patience.
"Could you receive Mrs. Joyce-Reeves in such a place?" she queried sweetly.
"Certainly; if any possible errand could bring that high and mighty personage over the door-sill."
"There is a possible reason."
Her tone drew him round. Jean, forgotten by both, discerned that he also attached a significance to the hypothetical visit. She was at a loss to account for this, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's prominence in the social world of New York notwithstanding.
"Is this your news, Julie?" he demanded.
His sister savored his quickened interest a moment.
"Part of it," she replied. "She saw your dry-point of me at Mrs. Quentin Van Ostade's the other day."
"The dry-point!" he deprecated. "It was only an experiment."
"So I told her. She asked if you do anything in the way of portraiture in oil, and of course I answered yes."
"I say!"
"Well, haven't you?"
"Trash, yes; cart-loads of it."
"Perhaps you call your portrait of Malcolm MacGregor trash? Mrs. Joyce-Reeves did not."
"She saw it!"
"I dropped casually that it had been hung with the Fifth Avenue exhibition of MacGregor's African studies, and she took the address. That was day before yesterday. This afternoon I met her again—met her leaving the gallery."
"Well?" jogged Atwood, impatiently.
"She told me she had bought two of MacGregor's things," continued Mrs. Van Ostade, not to be hurried. "She took a desert nocturne and that queer veiled woman at a window—you remember?"
"Do I!" He spun about. "You heard that, Jean? Mrs. Joyce-Reeves has bought 'The Lattice'! Miss Fanshaw posed for it, Julie."
"Indeed!" The lorgnon, again unsheathed at the intimate "Jean," once more took cognizance of that young person's existence. "I don't care for it. But, what is more important, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves mentioned your portrait."
"Yes?"
"And this time asked for your address."
"Jove! You think—"
"I'm positive she'll give you a commission."
"Jove!" he exclaimed again, "what a chance!" and paced the studio. "Yet she may. It's her whim to pose as a discoverer. What a chance! What a colossal chance! It would mean—what wouldn't it mean?" He stopped excitedly before the escritoire where Jean sat waiting to resume her interrupted impersonation of a note-writing débutante. "It would take nerve, no end of it. She's been painted by Sargent, Chartran, Zorn—all the big guns. A fellow would have to find a phase they'd missed. But if he could! You can't conceive her influence, Jean. If she buys a man's pictures, all the little fish in her pond tumble over one another to buy them, too. That's not the main issue, however, though I don't blink its importance. The opportunity to painther, to search out the woman behind—that's the big thing. I have a theory. I met her once—she'd bought an original of mine, thanks again to Julie—and something she let fall makes me think—but I'm talking as if I had the commission in my hands."
Jean scarcely heard. Sympathize with him as she might, Julie Van Ostade's face, from the moment Atwood's talk ceased to be hers exclusively, absorbed her more.
"Craig," broke in his sister, crisply, "my furs."
He touched earth blankly.
"Not going, Julie?"
"My furs," she repeated.
"But I haven't begun to thank you," he said, obeying.
"Is not that also premature?" She rustled majestically toward the door, which he sprang before her to open. The girl was but a lay figure in her path.
Then the door closed and Atwood, wearing a look of bewilderment, came slowly up the studio to meet still another problem in feminine psychology in the now thoroughly outraged Jean.
"Why did you introduce me?" she demanded bitterly. "Why couldn't you let me remain a common model to her? I am a common model in her eyes—common in every sense. I remember well enough where she saw me, and she'll remember, too, never fear."
"Jean! Jean!" He came to her in distress.
"It was a drinking-place, and the girl with me had drunk too much. We amused your sister's theater-party immensely. They were probably slumming—seeing low life!"