And up through the lane, all oblivious, the lovers were walking slowly. Just before they reached the gap in the wall, they paused by common consent. Cherry and apple trees drooped over the wall; these had ceased blossoming, but a tangle of wild-rose bushes was all ablush. It dropped a thick harvest of petals on the ground. Joe bent his head; and Esther, resting against his shoulder, lifted her eyes to his face. All unconsciously she took the pose of the woman in the Frohman poster. They kissed, and then went on slowly.
Cordelia Angeline Mahoney was dressing, as she would say, "to keep a date" with a beau, who would soon be waiting on the corner nearest her home in the Big Barracks tenement-house. She smiled as she heard the shrill catcall of a lad in Forsyth Street. She knew it was Dutch Johnny's signal to Chrissie Bergen to come down and meet him at the street doorway. Presently she heard another call—a birdlike whistle—and she knew which boy's note it was, and which girl it called out of her home for a sidewalk stroll. She smiled, a trifle sadly, and yet triumphantly. She had enjoyed herself when she was no wiser and looked no higher than the younger Barracks girls, who took up the boys of the neighborhood as if there were no others.
She was in her own little dark inner room, which she shared with only two others of the family, arranging a careful toilet by kerosene-light. The photograph of herself in trunks and tights, of which we heard in the story of Elsa Muller's hopeless love, was before her, among several portraits of actresses and salaried beauties. She had taken them out from under the paper in the top drawer of the bureau. She always kept them there, and always took them out and spread them in the lamp-light when she was alone in her room. She glanced approvingly at the portrait of herself as a picture of which she had said to more than one girlish confidante that it showed as neat a figure and as perfectly shaped limbs as any actress's she had ever seen. But the suggestion of a frown flitted across her brow as she thought how silly she was to have once been "stage-struck"—how foolish to have thought that mere beauty could quickly raise a poor girl to a high place on the stage. Julia Fogarty's case proved that. Julia and she were stage-struck together, and where was Julia—or Corynne Belvedere, as she now called herself? She started well as a figurante in a comic opera company up-town, but from that she dropped to a female minstrel troupe in the Bowery, and now, Lewy Tusch told Cordelia, she was "tooing ter skirt-tance in ter pickernic parks for ter sick-baby fund, ant passin' ter hat arount afterwarts." And evil was being whispered of her—a pretty high price to pay for such small success; and it must be true, because she sometimes came home late at night in cabs, which are devilish, except when used at funerals.
It was Cordelia who attracted Elsa Muller's sweetheart, Yank Hurst, to her side, and left Elsa to die yearning for his return. And it was Cordelia who threw Hurst aside when he took to drink and stabbed the young man who, during a mere walk from church, took his place beside Cordelia. And yet Cordelia was only ambitious, not wicked. Few men live who would not look twice at her. She was not of the stunted tenement type, like her friends Rosie Mulvey and Minnie Bechman and Julia Moriarty. She was tall and large and stately, and yet plump in every outline. Moreover, she had the "style" of an American girl, and looked as well in five dollars' worth of clothes—all home-made, except her shoes and stockings—as almost any girl in richer circles. It was too bad that she was called a flirt by the young men, and a stuck-up thing by the girls, when in fact she was merely more shrewd and calculating than the others, who were content to drift out of the primary schools into the shops, and out of the shops into haphazard matrimony. Cordelia was not lovable, but not all of us are who may be better than she. She was monopolized by the hope of getting a man; but a mere alliance with trousers was not the sum of her hope; they must jingle with coin.
It was strange, then, that she should be dressing to meet Jerry Donahue, who was no better than gilly to the Commissioner of Public Works, drawing a small salary from a clerkship he never filled, while he served the Commissioner as a second left hand. But if we could see into Cordelia's mind we would be surprised to discover that she did not regard herself as flesh-and-blood Mahoney, but as romantic Clarice Delamour, and she only thought of Jerry as James the butler. The voracious reader of the novels of to-day will recall the story of Clarice, or Only a Lady's-Maid, which many consider the best of the several absorbing tales that Lulu Jane Tilley has written. Cordelia had read it twenty times, and almost knew it by heart. Her constant dream was that she could be another Clarice, and shape her life like hers. The plot of the novel needs to be briefly told, since it guided Cordelia's course.
Clarice was maid to a wealthy society dowager. James the butler fell in love with Clarice when she first entered the household, and she, hearing the servants' gossip about James's savings and salary, had encouraged his attentions. He pressed her to marry him. But young Nicholas Stuyvesant came home from abroad to find his mother ill and Clarice nursing her. Every day he noticed the modest rosy maid moving noiselessly about like a sunbeam. Her physical perfection profoundly impressed him. In her presence he constantly talked to his mother about his admiration for healthy women. Each evening Clarice reported to him the condition of the mother, and on one occasion mentioned that she had never known ache, pain, or malady in her life. The young man often chatted with her in the drawing-room, and James the butler got his congé. Mr. Stuyvesant induced his mother to make Clarice her companion, and then he met her at picture exhibitions, and in Central Park by chance, and next—every one will recall the exciting scene—he paid passionate court to her "in the pink sewing-room, where she had reclined on soft silken sofa pillows, with her tiny slippers upon the head of a lion whose skin formed a rug before her." Clarice thought him unprincipled, and repulsed him. When the widow recovered her health and went to Newport, the former maid met all society there. A gifted lawyer fell a victim to Clarice's charms, and, on a moonlit porch overlooking the sea, warned her against young Stuyvesant. On learning that the roué had already attempted to weaken the girl's high principles, to rescue her he made her his wife. He was soon afterward elected Mayor of New York, but remained a suitor for his beautiful wife's approbation, waiting upon her in gilded halls with the fidelity of a knight of old.
Cordelia adored Clarice and fancied herself just like her—beautiful, ambitious, poor, with a future of her own carving. Of course such a case is phenomenal. No other young woman was ever so ridiculous.
"You have on your besht dresh, Cordalia," said her mother. "It'll soon be wore out, an' ye'll git no other, wid your father oidle, an' no wan airnin' a pinny but you an' Johnny an' Sarah Rosabel. Fwhere are ye goin'?"
"I won't be gone long," said Cordelia, half out of the hall door.
"Cordalia Angeline, darlin'," said her mother, "mind, now, doan't let them be talkin' about ye, fwherever ye go—shakin' yer shkirts an' rollin' yer eyes. It doan't luk well for a gyurl to be makin' hersel' attractive."
"Oh, mother, I'm not attractive, and you know it."
With her head full of meeting Jerry Donahue, Cordelia tripped down the four flights of stairs to the street door. As Clarice, she thought of Jerry as James the butler; in fact, all the beaux she had had of late were so many repetitions of the unfortunate James in her mind. All the other characters in her acquaintance were made to fit more or less loosely into her romance life, and she thought of everything she did as if it all happened in Lulu Jane Tilley's beautiful novel. Let the reader fancy, if possible, what a feat that must have been for a tenement girl who had never known what it was to have a parlor, in our sense of the word, who had never known courtship to be carried on indoors, except in a tenement hallway, and who had to imagine that the sidewalk flirtations of actual life were meetings in private parks, that the wharves and public squares and tenement roofs where she had seen all the young men and women making love were heavily carpeted drawing-rooms, broad manor, house verandas, and the fragrant conservatories of luxurious mansions! But Cordelia managed all this mental necromancy easily, to her own satisfaction. And now she was tripping down the bare wooden stairs beside the dark greasy wall, and thinking of her future husband, the rich Mayor, who must be either the bachelor police captain of the precinct, or George Fletcher, the wealthy and unmarried factory-owner near by, or, perhaps, Senator Eisenstone, the district leader, who, she was forced to reflect, was an unlikely hero for a Catholic girl, since he was a Hebrew. But just as she reached the street door and decided that Jerry would do well enough as a mere temporary James the butler, and while Jerry was waiting for her on the corner, she stepped from the stoop directly in front of George Fletcher.
"Good evening," said the wealthy, young employer.
"Good evening, Mr. Fletcher."
"It's very embarrassing," said Mr. Fletcher: "I know your given name—Cordelia, isn't it?—but your last na—Oh, thank you—Miss Mahoney, of course. You know we met at that very queer wedding in the home of my little apprentice, Joe—the line-man's wedding, you know."
"Te he!" Cordelia giggled. "Wasn't that a terrible strange wedding? I think it was just terrible."
"Were you going somewhere?"
"Oh, not at all, Mr. Fletcher," with another nervous giggle or two. "I have no plans on me mind, only to get out of doors. It's terrible hot, ain't it?"
"May I take a walk with you, Miss Mahoney?"
It seemed to her that if he had called her Clarice the whole novel would have come true then and there.
"I can't be out very late, Mr. Fletcher," said she, with a giggle of delight.
"Are you sure I am not disarranging your plans? Had you no engagements?"
"Oh no," said she; "I was only going out with me lonely."
"Let us take just a short walk, then," said Fletcher; "only you must be the man and take me in charge, Miss Mahoney, for I never walked with a young lady in my life."
"Oh, certainly not; you never did—I don't think."
"Upon my honor, Miss Mahoney, I know only one woman in this city—Miss Whitfield, the doctor's daughter, who lives in the same house with you; and only one other in the world—my aunt, who brought me up, in Vermont."
Well indeed did Cordelia know this. All the neighborhood knew it, and most of the other girls were conscious of a little flutter in their breasts when his eyes fell upon them in the streets, for it was the gossip of all who knew his workmen that the prosperous ladder-builder lived in his factory, where his had spent the life of a monk, without any society except of his canaries, his books, and his workmen.
"Well, I declare!" sighed Cordelia. "How terrible cunning you men are, to get up such a story to make all the girls think you're romantic!"
But, oh, how happy Cordelia was! At last she had met her prince—the future Mayor—her Sultan of the gilded halls. In that humid, sticky, midsummer heat among the tenements, every other woman dragged along as if she weighed a thousand pounds, but Cordelia felt like a feather floating among clouds.
The babel—did the reader ever walk up Forsyth Street on a hot night, into Second Avenue, and across to Avenue A, and up to Tompkins Park? The noise of the tens of thousands on the pavements makes a babel that drowns the racket of the carts and cars. The talking of so many persons, the squalling of so many babies, the mothers scolding and slapping every third child, the yelling of the children at play, the shouts and loud repartee of the men and women—all these noises rolled together in the air makes a steady hum and roar that not even the breakers on a hard sea-beach can equal. You might say that the tenements were empty, as only the very sick, who could not move, were in them. For miles and miles they were bare of humanity, each flat unguarded and unlocked, with the women on the sidewalks, with the youngest children in arms or in perambulators, while those of the next sizes romped in the streets; with the girls and boys of fourteen giggling in groups in the doorways (the age and places where sex first asserts itself), and only the young men and women missing; for they were in the parks, on the wharves, and on the roofs, all frolicking and love-making.
And every house front was like a Russian stove, expending the heat it had sucked from the all-day sun. And every door and window breathed bad air—air without oxygen, rich and rank and stifling.
But Cordelia was Clarice, the future Mayoress. She did not know she was picking a tiresome way around the boys at leap-frog, and the mothers and babies and baby-carriages. She did not notice the smells, or feel the bumps she got from those who ran against her. She thought she was in the blue drawing-room at Newport, where a famous Hungarian count was trilling the soft prelude to a csárdás on the piano, and Mr. Stuyvesant had just introduced her to the future Mayor, who was spellbound by her charms, and was by her side, a captive. She reached out her hand, and it touched Mr. Fletcher's arm (just as a ragamuffin propelled himself head first against her), and Mr. Fletcher bent his elbow, and her wrist rested in the crook of his arm. Oh, her dream was true; her dream was true!
Mr. Fletcher, on the other hand, was hardly in a more natural relation. He was trying to think how the men talked to women in all the literature he had read. The myriad jokes about the fondness of girls for ice-cream recurred to him, and he risked everything on their fidelity to fact.
"Are you fond of ice-cream?" he inquired.
"Oh no; I don't think," said Cordelia. "What'll you ask next? What girl ain't crushed on ice-cream, I'd like to know?"
"Do you know of a nice place to get some?"
"Do I? The Dutchman's, on the av'noo, another block up, is the finest in the city. You get mo—that is, you get everything 'way up in G there, with cakes on the side, and it don't cost no more than anywhere else."
So to the German's they went, and Clarice fancied herself at the Casino in Newport. All the girls around her, who seemed to be trying to swallow the spoons, took on the guise of blue-blooded belles, while the noisy boys and young men (calling out, "Hully gee, fellers! look at Nifty gittin' out der winder widout payin'!" and, "Say, Tilly, what kind er cream is dat you're feedin' your face wid?") seemed to her so many millionaires and the exquisite sons thereof. To Mr. Fletcher the German's back-yard saloon, with its green lattice walls, and its rusty dead Christmas trees in painted butter-kegs, appeared uncommonly brilliant and fine. The fact that whenever he took a swallow of water the ice-cream turned to cold candle-grease in his mouth made no difference. He was happy, and Cordelia was in an ecstasy by the time he had paid a shock-headed, bare-armed German waiter, and they were again on the avenue side by side. She put out her hand and rested it on his arm again—to make sure she was Clarice.
One would like to know whether, in the breasts of such as these, familiar environment exerts any remarkable influence. If so, it could have been in but one direction. For that part of town was one vast nursery. Everywhere, on every side, were the swarming babies—a baby for every flag-stone in the pavements. Babies and babies, and little besides babies, except larger children and the mothers. Perambulators with two, even three, baby passengers; mothers with as many as five children trailing after them; babies in broad baggy laps, babies at the breast, babies creeping, toppling, screaming, overflowing into the gutters. Such was the unbroken scene from the Big Barracks to Tompkins Square; ay, to Harlem and to the East River, and almost to Broadway. In the park, as if the street scenes had been merely preliminary, the paths were alive, wriggling, with babies of every age, from the new-born to the children in pigtails and knickerbockers—and, lo! these were already paired and practising at courtship. The walk that Cordelia was taking was amid a fever, a delirium, of maternity—a rhapsody, a baby's opera, if one considered its noise. In that vast region no one inquired whether marriage was a failure. Nothing that is old and long-beloved and human is a failure there.
In Tompkins Park, while they dodged babies and stepped around babies and over them, they saw many happy couples on the settees, and they noticed that often the men held their arms around the waists of their sweethearts. Girls, too, in other instances, leaned loving heads against the young men's breasts, blissfully regardless of publicity. They passed a young man and a woman kissing passionately, as kissing is described by unmarried girl novelists. Cordelia thought it no harm to nudge Mr. Fletcher and whisper:
"Sakes alive! They're right in it, ain't they. 'It's funny when you feel that way,' ain't it?"
As many another man who does not know the frankness and simplicity of the plain people might have done, Mr. Fletcher misjudged the girl. He thought her the sort of girl he was far from seeking. He grew instantly cold and reserved, and she knew, vaguely, that she had displeased him.
"I think people who make love in public should be locked up," said he.
"Some folks wants everybody put away that enjoys themselves," said Cordelia. Then, lest she had spoken too strongly, she added, "Present company not intended, Mr. Fletcher, but you said that like them mission folks that come around praising themselves and tellin' us all we're wicked."
"And do you think a girl can be good who behaves so in public?"
"I know plenty that's done it," said she; "and I don't know any girls but what's good. They 'ain't got wings, maybe, but you don't want to monkey with 'em, neither."
He recollected her words for many a year afterward and pondered them, and perhaps they enlarged his understanding. She also often thought of his condemnation of love-making out-of-doors. Kissing in public, especially promiscuous kissing, she knew to be a debatable pastime, but she also knew that there was not a flat in the Big Barracks in which a girl could carry on a courtship. Fancy her attempting it in her front room, with the room choked with people, with the baby squalling, and her little brothers and sisters quarrelling, with her mother entertaining half a dozen women visitors with tea or beer, and with a man or two dropping in to smoke with her father! Parlor courtship was to her, like precise English, a thing only known in novels. The thought of novels floated her soul back into the dream state.
"I think Cordelia's a pretty name," said Fletcher, cold at heart but struggling to be companionable.
"I don't," said Cordelia. "I'm not at all crushed on it. Your name's terrible pretty. I think my three names looks like a map of Ireland when they're written down. I know a killin' name for a girl. It's Clarice. Maybe some day I'll give you a dare. I'll double dare you, maybe, to call me Clarice."
Oh, if he only would, she thought—if he would only call her so now! But she forgot how unelastic his strange routine of life must have left him, and she did not dream how her behavior in the park had displeased him.
"Cordelia is a pretty name," he repeated. "At any rate, I think we should try to make the most and best of whatever name has come to us. I wouldn't sail under false colors for a minute."
"Oh!" said she, with a giggle to hide her disappointment; "you're so terrible wise! When you talk them big words you can pass me in a walk."
Anxious to display her great conquest to the other girls of the Barracks neighborhood, Cordelia persuaded Mr. Fletcher to go to what she called "the dock," to enjoy the cool breath of the river. All the piers and wharves are called "docks" by the people. Those which are semi-public and are rented to miscellaneous excursion and river steamers are crowded nightly.
The wharf to which our couple strolled was a mere flooring above the water, edged with a stout string-piece, which formed a bench for the mothers. They were there in groups, some seated on the string-piece with babes in arms or with perambulators before them, and others, facing these, standing and joining in the gossip, and swaying to and fro to soothe their little ones. Those who gave their offspring the breast did so publicly, unembarrassed by a modesty they would have considered false. A few youthful couples, boy by girl and girl by boy, sat on the string-piece and whispered, or bandied fun with those other lovers who patrolled the flooring of the wharf. A "gang" of rude young men—toughs—walked up and down, teasing the girls, wrestling, scuffling, and roaring out bad language. Troops of children played at leap-frog, high-spy, jack-stones, bean-bag, hop-scotch, and tag. At the far end of the pier some young men and women waltzed, while a lad on the string-piece played for them on his mouth-organ. A steady, cool, vivifying breeze from the bay swept across the wharf and fanned all the idlers, and blew out of their heads almost all recollection of the furnacelike heat of the town.
Cordelia forgot her desire to display her conquest. She forgot her true self. She likened the wharf to that "lordly veranda overlooking the sea," where the future Mayor begged Clarice to be his bride. She knew just what she would say when her prince spoke his lines. She and Mr. Fletcher were just about to seat themselves on the great rim of the wharf, when an uproar of the harsh, froglike voices of half-grown men caused them to turn around. They saw Jerry Donahue striding towards them, but with difficulty, because half a dozen lads and youths were endeavoring to hold him back.
"Dat's Mr. Fletcher," they said. "It ain't his fault, Jerry. He's dead square; he's a gent, Jerry."
The politician's gilly tore himself away from his friends. The gang of toughs gathered behind the others. Jerry planted himself in front of Cordelia. Evidently he did not know the submissive part he should have played in Cordelia's romance. James the butler made no out-break, but here was Jerry angry through and through.
"You didn't keep de date wid me," he began.
"Oh, Jerry, I did—I tried to, but you—" Cordelia was red with shame.
"The hell you did! Wasn't I—"
"Here!" said Mr. Fletcher; "you can't swear at this lady."
"Why wouldn't I?" Jerry asked. "What would you do?"
"He's right, Jerry. Leave him be—see?" said the chorus of Jerry's friends.
"A-a-a-h!" snarled Jerry. "Let him leave me be, then. Cordelia, I heard you was a dead fraud, an' now I know it, and I'm a-tellin' you so, straight—see? I was a-waitin' 'cross der street, an' I seen you come out an' meet dis mug, an' you never turned yer head to see was I on me post. I seen dat, an' I'm a-tellin' yer friend just der kind of a racket you give me, der same's you've give a hundred other fellers. Den, if he likes it he knows what he's gittin'."
Jerry was so angry that he all but pushed his distorted face against that of the humiliated girl as he denounced her. Mr. Fletcher gently moved her backward a step or two, and advanced to where she had stood.
"That will do," he said to Jerry. "I want no trouble, but you've said enough. If there's more, say it to me."
"A-a-a-h!" exclaimed the gilly, expectorating theatrically over his shoulder. "Me friends is on your side, an' I ain't pickin' no muss wid you. But she's got der front of der City Hall to do me like she done. And say, fellers, den she was goin' ter give me a song an' dance 'bout lookin' fer me. Ba-a-a! She knows my 'pinion of her—see?"
The crowd parted to let Mr. Fletcher finish his first evening's gallantry to a lady by escorting Cordelia to her home. It was a chilly and mainly a silent journey. Cordelia falteringly apologized for Jerry's misbehavior, but she inferred from what Mr. Fletcher said that he did not fully join her in blaming the angry youth. Mr. Fletcher touched her fingertips in bidding her good-night, and nothing was said of a meeting in the future. Clarice was forgotten, and Cordelia was not only herself again, but quite a miserable self, for her sobs awoke the little brother and sister who shared her bed.
Miss Snell began to apologize for interrupting the work almost before she came in. The Painter, who grudgingly opened one half of the folding-door wide enough to let her pass into the studio, was annoyed to observe that, in spite of her apologies, she was loosening the furs about her throat as if in preparation for a lengthy visit. Then for the first time, behind her tall, black-draped figure, he caught sight of her companion, who was shorter, and whose draperies were of a less ample character—for Miss Snell, being tall and thin, resorted to voluminous garments to conceal her slimness of person. A large plumed hat accentuated, her sallowness and sharpness of feature, and her dark eyes, set under heavy black brows, intensified her look of unhealthy pallor.
She was perfectly at her ease, and introduced her companion, Miss Price, in a few words, explaining that the latter had come over for a year or so to study, and was anxious to have the best advice about it.
"So I brought her straight here," Miss Snell announced, triumphantly.
Miss Price seemed a trifle overcome by the novelty of her surroundings, but managed to say, in a high nasal voice, that she had already begun to work at Julian's, but did not find it altogether satisfactory.
The Painter, looking at her indifferently, was roused to a sudden interest by her face. Her features and complexion were certainly pleasing, but the untidy mass of straggling hair topped by a battered straw sailor hat diverted the attention of a casual observer from her really unusual delicacy of feature and coloring. She was tall and slim, although now she was dwarfed by Miss Snell's gaunt figure. A worn dress and shabby green cape fastened at the neck by a button hanging precariously on its last thread completed her very unsuitable winter attire. Outside the great studio window a cold December twilight was settling down over roofs covered with snow and icicles, and the Painter shivered involuntarily as he noticed the insufficiency of her wraps for such weather, and got up to stir the fire which glowed in the big stove.
In one corner his model waited patiently for the guests to depart, and he now dismissed her for the day, eliciting faint protestations from Miss Snell, who, however, was settling down comfortably in an easy-chair by the fire, with an evident intention of staying indefinitely. Miss Price's large, somewhat expressionless blue eyes were taking in the whole studio, and the Painter could feel that she was distinctly disappointed by her inspection. She had evidently anticipated something much grander, and this bare room was not the ideal place she had fancied the studio of a world-renowned painter would prove to be.
Bare painted walls, a peaked roof with a window reaching far overhead, a polished floor, one or two chairs and a divan, the few necessary implements of his profession, and many canvases faced to the wall, but little or no bric-à-brac or delightful studio properties. The Painter was also conscious that her inspection included him personally, and was painfully aware that she was regarding him with the same feeling of disappointment; she quite evidently thought him too young and insignificant looking for a person of his reputation.
Miss Snell had not given him time to reply to Miss Price's remark about her study at Julian's, but prattled on about her own work and the unsurmountable difficulties that lay in the way of a woman's successful career as a painter.
"I have been studying for years under ——," said Miss Snell, "and really I have no time to lose. It will end by my simply going to him and saying, quite frankly: 'Now, Monsieur ——, I have been in your atelier for four years, and I can't afford to waste another minute. There are no two ways about it. You positively must tell me how to do it. You really must not keep me waiting any longer. I insist upon it.' How discouraging it is!" she sighed. "It seems quite impossible to find any one who is willing to give the necessary information."
Miss Price's wandering eyes had at last found a resting-place on a large, half-finished canvas standing on an easel. Something attractive in the pose and turn of her head made the Painter watch her as he lent a feeble attention to Miss Snell's conversation.
Miss Price's lips were very red, and the clear freshness of extreme youth bloomed in her cheeks; she was certainly charming. During one of Miss Snell's rare pauses she spoke, and her thin high voice came with rather a shock from between her full lips.
"May I look?" was her unnecessary question, for her eyes had never left the canvas on the easel since they had first rested there. She rose as she spoke, and went over to the painting.
The Painter pulled himself out of the cushions on the divan where he had been lounging, and went over to push the big canvas into a better light. Then he stood, while the girl gazed at it, saying nothing, and apparently oblivious to everything but the work before him.
He was roused, not by Miss Price, who remained admiringly silent, but by the enraptured Miss Snell, who had also risen, gathering furs and wraps about her, and was now ecstatically voluble in her admiration. English being insufficient for the occasion, she had to resort to French for the expression of her enthusiasm.
The Painter said nothing, but watched the younger girl, who turned away at last with a sigh of approbation. He was standing under the window, leaning against a table littered with paints and brushes.
"Stay where you are!" exclaimed Miss Snell, excitedly. "Is he not charming, Cora, in that half-light? You must let me paint you just so some day—you must indeed." She clutched Miss Price and turned her forcibly in his direction.
The Painter, confused by this unexpected onslaught, moved hastily away and busied himself with a pretence of clearing the table.
"I—I should be delighted," he stammered, in his embarrassment, and he caught Miss Price's eye, in which he fancied a smile was lurking.
"But you have not given Miss Price a word of advice about her work," said Miss Snell, as she fastened her wraps preparatory to departure. She seemed quite oblivious to the fact that she had monopolized all the conversation herself.
He turned politely to Miss Price, who murmured something about Julian's being so badly ventilated, but gave him no clew as to her particular branch of the profession. Miss Snell, however, supplied all details. It seemed Miss Price was sharing Miss Snell's studio, having been sent over by the Lynxville, Massachusetts, Sumner Prize Fund, for which she had successfully competed, and which provided a meagre allowance for two years' study abroad.
"She wants to paint heads," said Miss Snell; and in reply to a remark about the great amount of study required to accomplish this desire, surprised him by saying, "Oh, she only wants to paint them well enough to teach, not well enough to sell."
"I'll drop in and see your work some afternoon," promised the Painter, warmed by their evident intention of leaving; and he escorted them to the landing, warning them against the dangerous steepness of his stairway, which wound down in almost murky darkness.
Ten minutes later the centre panel of his door displayed a card bearing these words: "At home only after six o'clock."
"I wonder I never thought of doing this before," he reflected, as he lit a cigarette and strolled off to a neighboring restaurant; "I am always out by that hour."
Several weeks elapsed before he saw Miss Price again, for he promptly forgot his promise to visit her studio and inspect her work. His own work was very absorbing just then, and the short winter days all too brief for its accomplishment. He was struggling to complete the large canvas that Miss Snell had so volubly admired during her visit, and it really seemed to be progressing. But the weather changed suddenly from frost to thaw, and he woke one morning to find little runnels of dirty water coursing down his window and dismally dripping into the muddy street below. It made him feel blue, and his big picture, which had seemed so promising the day before, looked hopelessly bad in this new mood. So he determined to take a day off, and, after his coffee, strolled out into the Luxembourg Gardens. There the statues were green with mouldy dampness, and the paths had somewhat the consistency of very thin oatmeal porridge. Suddenly the sun came out brightly, and he found a partially dry bench, where he sat down to brood upon the utter worthlessness of things in general and the Luxembourg statuary in particular. The sunny façade of the palace glittered in the brightness. One of his own pictures hung in its gallery. "It is bad," he said to himself, "hopelessly bad," and he gloomily felt the strongest proof of its worthlessness was its popularity with the public. He would probably go on thinking this until the weather or his mood changed.
As his eyes strayed from the palace, he glanced up a long vista between leafless trees and muddy grass-plats. A familiar figure in a battered straw hat and scanty green cloak was advancing in his direction; the wind, blowing back the fringe of disfiguring short hair, disclosed a pure unbroken line of delicate profile, strangely simple, and recalling the profiles in Botticelli's lovely fresco in the Louvre. Miss Price, for it was she, carried a painting-box, and under one arm a stretcher that gave her infinite trouble whenever the wind caught it. As she passed, the Painter half started up to join her, but she gave him such a cold nod that his intention was nipped in the bud. He felt snubbed, and sank back on his bench, taking a malicious pleasure in observing that, womanlike, she ploughed through all the deepest puddles in her path, making great splashes about the hem of her skirt, that fluttered out behind her as she walked, for her hands were filled, and she had no means of holding it up.
The Painter resented his snubbing. He was used to the most humble deference from the art students of the quarter, who hung upon his slightest word, and were grateful for every stray crumb of his attention.
He now lost what little interest he had previously taken in his surroundings. Just before him in a large open space reserved for the boys to play handball was a broken sheet of glistening water reflecting the blue sky, the trees rattled their branches about in the wind, and now and then a tardy leaf fluttered down from where it had clung desperately late into the winter. The gardens were almost deserted. It was too early for the throng of beribboned nurses and howling infants who usually haunt its benches. One or two pedestrians hurried across the garden, evidently taking the route to make shortcuts to their destinations, and not for the pleasure of lounging among its blustery attractions.
After idling an hour on his bench, he went to breakfast with a friend who chanced to live conveniently near, and where he made himself very disagreeable by commenting unfavorably on the work in progress and painting in particular. Then he brushed himself up and started off for the rue Notre Dame des Champs, where Miss Snell's studio was situated. It was one of a number huddled together in an old and rather dilapidated building, and the porter at the entrance gave him minute directions as to its exact location, but after stumbling up three flights of dark stairs he had no trouble in finding it, for Miss Snell's name, preceded by a number of initials, shone out from a door directly in front of him as he reached the landing.
He knocked, and for several minutes there was a wild scurrying within and a rattle and clash of crockery. Then Miss Snell appeared at the door, and exclaimed, in delighted surprise:
"How do you do? We had quite given you up."
She looked taller and longer than ever swathed in a blue painting-apron and grasping her palette and brushes. She had to apologize for not shaking hands with him, because her fingers were covered with paint that had been hastily but ineffectually wiped off on a rag before she answered his knock.
He murmured something about not coming before because of his work, but she would not let him finish, saying, intensely,
"We know how precious every minute is to you."
Miss Price came reluctantly forward and shook hands; she had evidently not been painting, for her fingers were quite clean. Short ragged hair once more fell over her forehead, and the Painter felt a shock of disappointment, and wondered why he had thought her so fine when she passed him in the morning.
"I was just going to paint Cora," announced Miss Snell. "She is taking a holiday this afternoon, and we were hunting for a pose when you knocked."
"Don't let me interrupt you," he said, smiling. "Perhaps I can help."
Miss Snell was in a flutter at once, and protested that she should be almost afraid to work while he was there.
"In that case I shall leave at once," he said; but his chair was comfortable, and he made no motion to go.
"What a queer little place it is!" he reflected, as he looked about. "All sorts of odds and ends stuck about helter-skelter, and the house-keeping things trying to masquerade as bric-à-brac."
Cora Price looked decidedly sulky when she realized that the Painter intended to stay, and seeing this he became rooted in his intention. He wondered why she took this particular attitude towards him, and concluded she was piqued because of his delay in calling. She acted like a spoiled child, and caused Miss Snell, who was overcome by his condescension in staying, no little embarrassment.
It was quite evident from her behavior that Miss Price was impressed with her own importance as the beneficiary of the Lynxville Prize Fund, and would require the greatest deference from her acquaintances in consequence.
"Here, Cora, try this," said Miss Snell, planting a small three-legged stool on a rickety model-stand.
"Might I make a suggestion?" said the Painter, coolly. "I should push back all the hair on her forehead; it gives a finer line."
"Why, of course!" said Miss Snell. "I wonder we never thought of that before. Cora dear, you are much better with your hair back."
Cora said nothing, but the Botticelli profile glowered ominously against a background of sage-green which Miss Snell was elaborately draping behind it.
"If I might advise again," the Painter said, "I would take that down and paint her quite simply against the gray wall."
Miss Snell was quite willing to adopt every suggestion. She produced her materials and a fresh canvas, and began making a careful drawing, which, as it progressed, filled the Painter's soul with awe.
"I feel awfully like trying it myself," he said, after watching her for a few moments. "Can I have a bit of canvas?"
"Take anything," exclaimed Miss Snell; and he helped himself, refusing the easel which she wanted to force upon him, and propping his little stretcher up on a chair. Miss Snell stopped her drawing to watch him commence. It made her rather nervous to see how much paint he squeezed out on the palette; it seemed to her a reckless prodigality.
He eyed her assortment of brushes dubiously, selecting three from the draggled limp collection.
Cora was certainly a fine subject, in spite of her sulkiness, and he grew absorbed in his work, and painted away, with Miss Snell at his elbow making little staccato remarks of admiration as the sketch progressed. Suddenly he jumped up, realizing how long he had kept the young model.
"Dear me," he cried, "you must be exhausted!" and he ran to help her down from the model-stand.
She did look tired, and Miss Snell suggested tea, which he stayed to share. Cora became less and less sulky, and when at last he remembered that he had come to see her work, she produced it with less unwillingness than he had expected.
He was rather floored by her productions. As far as he could judge from what she showed him, she was hopelessly without talent, and he could only wonder which of these remarkably bad studies had won for her the Lynxville Sumner Prize Fund.
He tried to give her some advice, and was thanked when she put her things away.
Then they all looked at his sketch, which Miss Snell pronounced "too charming," and Cora plainly thought did not do her justice.
"I wish you would pose a few times for me, Miss Price," he said, before leaving. "I should like very much to paint you, and it would be doing me a great favor."
The girl did not respond to this request with any eagerness. He fancied he could see she was feeling huffy again at his meagre praise of her work.
Miss Snell, however, did not allow her to answer, but rapturously promised that Cora should sit as often as he liked, and paid no attention to the girl's protest that she had no time to spare.
"This has been simply in-spiring!" said Miss Snell, as she bade him good-bye, and he left very enthusiastic about Cora's profile, and with his hand covered with paint from Miss Snell's door-knob.
In spite of Miss Snell's assurance that Cora would pose, the Painter was convinced that she would not, if a suitable excuse could be invented. Feeling this, he wrote her a most civil note about it. The answer came promptly, and did not surprise him.
She was very sorry indeed, but she had no leisure hours at her disposal, and although she felt honored, she really could not do it. This was written on flimsy paper, in a big unformed handwriting, and it caused him to betake himself once more to Miss Snell's studio, where he found her alone—Cora was at Julian's.
She promised to beg Cora to pose, and accepted an invitation for them to breakfast with him in his studio on the following Sunday morning.
He carefully explained to her that his whole winter's work depended upon Cora's posing for him. He half meant it, having been seized with the notion that her type was what he needed to realize a cherished ideal, and he told this to Miss Snell, and enlarged upon it until he left her rooted in the conviction that he was hopelessly in love with Cora—a fact she imparted to that young woman on her return from Julian's.
Cora listened very placidly, and expressed no astonishment. He was not the first by any means; other people had been in love with her in Lynxville, Massachusetts, and she confided the details of several of these love-affairs to Miss Snell's sympathetic ears during the evening.
Meanwhile, the Painter did nothing, and a fresh canvas stood on his easel when the girls arrived for breakfast on Sunday morning. The big unfinished painting was turned to the wall; he had lost all interest in it.
"When I fancy doing a thing I am good for nothing else," he explained to Cora, after she had promised him a few sittings. "So you are really saving me from idleness by posing."
Cora laughed, and was silent. The Painter blessed her for not being talkative; her nasal voice irritated him, although her beautiful features were a constant delight.
Miss Snell had succeeded in permanently eliminating the disfiguring bang, and her charming profile was left unmarred.
"I want to paint you just as you are," he said, and noticing that she looked rather disdainfully at her shabby black cashmere, added, "The black of your dress could not be better."
"We thought," said Miss Snell, deprecatingly, "that you might like a costume. We could easily arrange one."
"Not in the least necessary," said the Painter. "I have set my heart on painting her just as she is."
The girls were disappointed in his want of taste. They had had visions of a creation in which two Liberty scarfs and a velveteen table cover were combined in a felicitous harmony of color.
"When can I have the first sitting?" he asked.
"Tuesday, I think," said Miss Snell, reflectively.
"Heavens!" thought the Painter. "Is Miss Snell coming with her?" And the possibility kept him in a state of nervousness until Tuesday afternoon, when Cora appeared, accompanied by the inevitable Miss Snell.
It turned out, however, that the latter could not stay. She would call for Cora later; just now her afternoons were occupied. She was doing a pastel portrait in the Champs Elysées quarter, so she reluctantly left, to the Painter's great relief.
He did not make himself very agreeable during the sittings which followed. He was apt to get absorbed in his work and to forget to say anything. Then Miss Snell would appear to fetch her friend, and he would apologize for being so dull, and Cora would remark that she enjoyed sitting quietly, it rested her after the noise and confusion at Julian's.
"If she talked much I could not paint her, her voice is so irritating," he confided to a friend who was curious and asked all sorts of questions about his new sitter.
The work went well but slowly, for Cora sat only twice a week. She felt obliged to devote the rest of her time to study, as she was living on the prize fund, and she even had qualms of conscience about the two afternoons she gave up to the sittings.
During all this time Miss Snell continued to weave chapters of romance about Cora and the Painter, and the girls talked things over after each sitting when they were alone together.
Spring had appeared very early in the year, and the public gardens and boulevards were richly green. Chestnut-trees blossomed and gaudy flower-beds bloomed in every square. The Salons opened, and were thronged with an enthusiastic public, although the papers as usual denounced them as being the poorest exhibitions ever given.
The Painter had sent nothing, being completely absorbed in finishing Cora's portrait, to the utter exclusion of everything else.
Cora did the exhibitions faithfully. It was one of the duties she owed to the Lynxville fund, and which she diligently carried out. The Painter bothered and confused her by many things; he persistently admired all the pictures she liked least, and praised all those she did not care for. She turned pale with suppressed indignation when he differed from her opinion, and resented his sweeping contempt of her criticisms.
On the strength of a remittance from the prize fund, and in honor of the season, she discarded the sailor hat for a vivid ready-made creation smacking strongly of the Bon Marché. The weather was warm, and Cora wore mitts, which the Painter thought unpardonable in a city where gloves are particularly cheap. The mitts were probably fashionable in Lynxville, Massachusetts. Miss Snell, who rustled about in stiff black silk and bugles, seemed quite oblivious to her friend's want of taste; she was all excitement, for her pastel portrait—by some hideous mistake—had been accepted and hung in one of the exhibitions, and the girls went together on varnishing-day to see it. There they met the Painter prowling aimlessly about, and Miss Snell was delighted to note his devotion to Cora. It was a strong proof of his attachment to her, she thought. The truth was he felt obliged to be civil after her kindness in posing. He wished he could repay her in some fashion, but since his first visit to Miss Snell's she had never offered to show him her work again, or asked his advice in any way, and he felt a delicacy about offering his services as a teacher when she gave him so little encouragement. He fancied, too, that she did not take much interest in his work, and knew she did not appreciate his portrait of her, which was by far the best thing he had ever done.
Her lack of judgment vexed him, for he knew the value of his work, and every day his fellow-painters trooped in to see it, and were loud in their praises. It would certainly be the clou of any exhibition in which it might be placed.
During one sitting Cora ventured to remark that she thought it a pity he did not intend to make the portrait more complete, and suggested the addition of various accessories which in her opinion would very much improve it.
"It's by far the most complete thing I have ever done," he said. "I sha'n't touch it again," and he flung down his brushes in a fit of temper.
She looked at him contemptuously, and putting on her hat, left the studio without another word; and for several weeks he did not see her again.
Then he met her in the street, and begged her to come and pose for a head in his big picture, which he had taken up once more. His apologies were so abject that she consented, but she ceased to be punctual, and he never could feel quite sure that she would keep her appointments.
Sometimes he would wait a whole afternoon in vain, and one day when she failed to appear at the promised hour he shut up his office and strolled down to the Seine. There he caught sight of her with a gay party who were about to embark on one of the little steamers that ply up and down the river.
He shook his fist at her from the quay where he stood, and watched her and her party step into the boat from the pier.
"She thinks little enough of the Lynxville Prize Fund when she wants an outing," he said to himself, scornfully.
After fretting a little over his wasted afternoon, he forgot all about her, and set to work with other models. Then he left Paris for the summer.