Читать книгу Light-Fingered Gentry - David Graham Phillips - Страница 5

V

NARCISSE AND ALOIS

When Amy thought of her surroundings again, she was within a few blocks of home. "I won't lunch alone," she said. "I can't, with this on my mind." Through the tube she bade the coachman turn back to the Siersdorf offices.

A few minutes, and her little victoria was at the curb before a brownstone house that would have passed for a residence had there not been, to the right of the doorway, a small bronze sign bearing the words, "A. and N. Siersdorf, Builders." Two women were together on the sidewalk at the foot of the stoop. One, Amy noted, had a curiously long face, a curiously narrow figure; but she noted nothing further, as there was nothing in her toilet to arrest the feminine eye, ever on the rove for opportunities to learn something, or to criticise something, in the appearance of other women. The other was Narcisse Siersdorf—a strong figure, somewhat below the medium height, like Amy herself; a certain remote Teutonic suggestion in the oval features, fair, fine skin and abundant fair hair; a quick, positive manner, the dress of a highly prosperous working woman, businesslike yet feminine and attractive in its details. The short blue skirt, for example, escaped the ground evenly, hung well and fitted well across the hips; the blue jacket was cut for freedom of movement without sacrificing grace of line; and her white gloves were fresh. As Amy descended, she heard Narcisse say to the other woman, "Now, please don't treat me as a 'foreign devil.' If I hadn't happened on you in the street, I'd never have seen you."

"Really, I've intended to stop in, every time I passed," said the other, moving away as she saw Amy approaching. "Good-by. I'll send you a note as soon as I get back—about a week."

"One of the girls from out West," Narcisse explained. "We went to school together for a while. She's as shy as a hermit thrush, but worth pursuing."

"You're to lunch with me," said Amy.

Narcisse shook her head. "No—and you're not lunching with me, to-day. My brother's come, and we've got to talk business."

Amy frowned, remembering that those tactics were of no avail with Narcisse. "Please! I want to meet your brother—I really ought to meet him. And I'll promise not to speak."

"He's a man; so he'd be unable to talk freely, with a woman there," replied Narcisse. "You two would be posing and trying to make an impression on each other."

"Please!"

They were in the doorway, Narcisse blocking the passage to the offices. "Good-by," she said. "You mustn't push in between the poor and their bread and butter."

Amy was turning away. Her expression—forlorn, hurt, and movingly genuine—was too much for Narcisse's firmness. "You're not especially gay to-day," said she, relentingly.

Amy, quick as a child to detect the yielding note, brought her flitting mind back to Armstrong and her troubles. "My faith in a person I was very fond of has been—shaken." There was a break in her voice, and her bright shallow eyes were misty.

"Come in," said Narcisse, not wholly deceived, but too soft-hearted not to give Amy the benefit of the doubt, just as she gave to whining beggars, though she knew they were "working" her. Anyhow, was not Amy to be pitied on general principles, and dealt gently with, as a victim of the blight of wealth?

Amy never entered those offices without a new sensation of pleasure. The voluntary environment of a human being is a projection, a reflection, of his inner self, is the plain, undeceiving index to his real life—for, is not the life within, the drama of thought, the real life, and the drama of action but the imperfect, distorted shadowgraph? The barest room can be most significant of the personality of its tenant; his failure to make any impression on his surroundings is conclusive. The most crowded or the gaudiest room may tell the same story as the barest. The Siersdorfs conducted their business in five rooms, each a different expression of the simplicity and sincerity which characterized them and their work. There was the same notable absence of the useless, of the merely ornamental, the same making of every detail contributory both to use and to beauty. One wearies of rooms that are in any way ostentatious; proclamation of simplicity is as tedious as proclamation of pretentiousness. Those rooms seemed to diffuse serenity; they were like the friends of whom one never tires because they always have something new and interesting to offer. Especially did there seem to be something miraculous about Narcisse's own private office. It had few articles in it, and they unobtrusive; yet, to sit in that room and look about was to have as many differing impressions as one would get in watching a beam of white light upon a plain of virgin snow.

"How do you do it!" Amy exclaimed, as she seated herself. She almost always made the same remark in the same circumstances. "But then," she went on, "you are a miracle. Now, there's the dress you've got on—it's a jacket, a blouse, a belt and a skirt. But what have you done to it? How do you induce your dressmaker to put together such things for you?"

"You have to tell a dressmaker what to do," replied Narcisse, "and then you have to tell her how to do it. If she knew what to make and how, she'd not stop at dressmaking long. As I get only a few things, I can take pains with them. But you get so many that you have to accept what somebody else has thought out, and just as they've thought it out."

"And the result is, I look a frump," said Amy, half believing it for the moment.

"You look the woman who has too many clothes to have any that really belong to her," replied Narcisse, greatly to Amy's secret irritation. "There's the curse of wealth—too many clothes, to be well dressed; too many servants, to be well served; too many and too big houses, to be well housed; too much food, to be well fed." Then to the office boy for whom she had rung, "Please ask my brother if he's ready."

Soon Siersdorf appeared—about five years younger than his sister, who seemed a scant thirty; in his dress and way of wearing the hair and beard a suggestion of Europe, of Paris, and of the artist—a mere suggestion, just a touch of individuality—but not a trace of pose, and no eccentricity. He was of the medium height, very blond, with more sympathy than strength in his features, but no defined weakness either. A boy-man of fine instincts and tastes, you would have said; indolent, yet capable of being spurred to toil; taking his color from his surroundings, yet retaining his own fiber. He was just back from a year abroad, where he had been studying country houses with especial reference to harmony between house and garden—for, the Siersdorfs had a theory that a place should be designed in its entirety and that the builder should be the designer. They called themselves builders rather than architects, because they thought that the separation of the two inseparable departments was a ruinous piece of artistic snobbishness—what is every kind of snobbishness in its essence but the divorce of brain and hand? "No self-respecting man," Siersdorf often said, "can look on his trade as anything but a profession, or on his profession as anything but a trade."

During lunch Amy all but forgot her father's depressing hints against Armstrong in listening as the brother and sister talked; and, as she listened, she envied. They were so interested, and so interesting. Their life revealed her own as drearily flat and wearily empty. They knew so much, knew it so thoroughly. "How could anyone else fail to get tired of me when I get so horribly tired of myself?" she thought, at the low ebb of depression about herself—an unusual mood, for habitually she took it for granted that she must be one of the most envied and most enviable persons in the world.

Narcisse suddenly said to her brother, "Whom do you think I met to-day? Neva Carlin." At that name Amy, startled, became alert. "She's got a studio down at the end of the block," Narcisse went on, "and is taking lessons from Boris Raphael. That shows she has real talent, unless—" She paused with a smile.

"Probably," said Alois. "Boris is always in love with some woman."

"In love with love," corrected Narcisse. "Men who are always in love care little about the particular woman who happens to be the medium of the moment."

"I thought she was well off," said Alois; and then he looked slightly confused, as if he was trying not to show that he had made a slip.

Narcisse seemed unconscious, though she replied with, "There are people in the world who work when they don't have to. And a few of them are women."

"But I thought she was married, too. It seems to me I heard it somewhere."

"I didn't ask questions," said Narcisse. "I never do, when I meet anyone I haven't seen in a long time. It's highly unsafe."

With studied carelessness Amy now said: "I'd like to know her. She's the woman you were talking with at the door just now, isn't she?"

"Yes," said Narcisse.

"She looked—unusual," continued Amy. "I wish you'd take me to see her."

"I'll be very glad to take you," Narcisse offered, on impulse. "Perhaps she's really got talent and isn't simply looking for a husband. Usually, when a woman shows signs of industry it means she's looking for a husband, whatever it may seem to mean. But, if Neva's in earnest about her work and has talent, you might put her in the way of an order or so."

"I'll go, any day," said Amy. "Please don't forget."

She departed as soon as lunch was over, and the brother and sister set out for their offices—not for their work; it they never left. "Pretty, isn't she?" said Alois. "And extremely intelligent."

"She is intelligent in a scrappy sort of way," replied his sister. "But she neither said nor did anything in your presence to-day to indicate it."

"Well, then—she's pretty enough to make a mere man think she's intelligent."

"I saw you were beginning to fall in love with her," said the sister.

"I? Ridiculous!"

"Oh, I know you better than you know yourself in some ways. You've been bent on marriage for several years now."

"I want children," said he, after a pause.

"That's it—children. But, instead of looking for a mother for children, you've got eyes only for the sort of women that either refuse to have children, or, if they have them, abandon them to nurses. Let the Amy Fosdick sort alone, Alois. A cane for a lounger; a staff for a traveler."

"You're prejudiced."

"I'm a woman, and I know women. And I have interest enough in you to tell you the exact truth about them."

"No woman ever knows the side of another woman that she shows only to the man she cares for."

"A very unimportant side. Its gilt hardly lasts through the wedding ceremony. If you are going to make the career you've got the talent for, you don't want an Amy Fosdick. You'd be better off without any wife, for that matter. You ought to have married when you were poor, if you were going to do it. You're too prosperous now. If you marry a poor woman, you'll spoil her; if you marry a rich woman, she'll spoil you."

"You're too harsh with your own sex, Narcisse," said Alois. "If I didn't know you so well, I'd think you were really hard. Who'd ever imagine, just hearing you talk, that you are so tender-hearted you have to be protected from your own sentimentality? The real truth is you don't want me to marry."

"To marry foolishly—no. Tell me, 'Lois, what could you gain by marrying—say, Amy Fosdick? In what way could she possibly help you? She couldn't make a home for you—she doesn't know the first thing about housekeeping. The prosperous people nowadays think their daughters are learning housekeeping when they're learning to ruin servants by ordering them about. You say I'm harsh with my sex, but, as a matter of fact, I'm only just."

"Just!" Alois laughed. "That's the harshest word the human tongue utters."

"I've small patience with women, I will admit. They amount to little, and they're sinking to less. Girls used to dream of the man they'd marry. Now it's not the man at all, but the establishment. Their romance is of furniture and carriages and servants and clothes. A man, any man, to support them in luxury."

"I've noticed that," admitted Alois.

"It's bad enough to look on marriage as a career," continued Narcisse. "But, pass that over. What do the women do to fit themselves for it? A man learns his business—usually in a half-hearted sort of way, but still he tries to learn a little something about it. A woman affects to despise hers—and does shirk it. She knows nothing about cooking, nothing about buying, nothing about values or quantities or economy or health or babies or— She rarely knows how to put on the clothes she gets; you'll admit that most women show plainly they haven't a notion what clothes they ought to wear. Women don't even know enough to get together respectably clever traps to catch the men with. The men fall in; they aren't drawn in."

"Yet," said Alois, ironic and irritated, "the world staggers on."

"Staggers," retorted Narcisse. "And the prosperous classes—we're talking about them—don't even stagger on. They stop and slide back—what can be expected of the husbands of such wives, the sons and daughters of such mothers?"

Narcisse was so intensely in earnest that her brother laughed outright. "There, there, Cissy," said he, "don't be alarmed—I'm not even engaged yet."

Narcisse made no reply. She knew the weak side of her brother's character, knew its melancholy possibilities of development; and she had guessed what was passing in his mind as he and Amy were trying each to please the other.

"You yourself would be the better—the happier, certainly—for falling in love," pursued Alois.

"Indeed I should," she assented with sincerity. "But the man who comes for me—or whom I set my snares for—must have something more than a pretty face or a few sex-tricks that ought not to fool a girl just out of the nursery."

No arrow penetrates a man's self-esteem more deeply than an insinuation that he is easy game for women. But Alois was no match for his sister at that kind of warfare. He hid his irritation, and said good-humoredly, "When you fall in love, my dear, it'll be just like the rest of us—with your heart, not with your head."

Narcisse looked at him shrewdly, yet lovingly, too. "I'm not afraid of your marrying because you've fallen in love. What I'm agitated about is lest you'll fall in love because you want to marry."

Alois had an uncomfortable look that was confession.

VI

NEVA GOES TO SCHOOL

Boris let a week, nearly two weeks, pass before he went to see Miss Carlin. He thought he was delaying in hope that the impulse to investigate her would wane and wink out. He had invariably had this same hope about every such impulse, and invariably had been disappointed. The truth was, whenever he happened upon a woman with certain lines of figure and certain expression of eyes—the lines and the expression that struck the keynote of his masculine nerves for the feminine—he pursued and paused not until he was satisfied, sated, calm again—or hopelessly baffled. And as he was attractive to women, and both adroit and reckless, and not at all afraid of them, his failures were few.

In this particular case the cause of his long delay in beginning was that he had just maneuvered his affair with the famously beautiful Mrs. Coventry to the point where each was trying to get rid of the other with full and obvious credit for being the one to break off. Mrs. Coventry was stupid; even her beauty, changelessly lovely, bored and irritated him. But nature had given her in default of brains a subtle craftiness; thus, she had been able to meet Boris's every attempt to cast her off with a move that put her in the position of seeming to be the one who was doing the casting—and Boris had a feminine vanity in those matters. At last, however, his weariness of his tiresome professional beauty and his impatience to begin a new adventure combined to make him indifferent to what people might say and think. Instead of sailing with Mrs. Coventry, as he had intended, he abruptly canceled his passage; and while she was descending the bay on the Oceanic, he was moving toward Miss Carlin's studio.

"You have not forgotten me?" said he in that delightfully ingenuous way of his, as he entered the large studio and faced the shy, plainly dressed young woman from the Western small town.

"No, indeed," replied she, obviously fluttered and flattered by this utterly unexpected visit from the great man.

"I come as a brother artist," he explained. He was standing before her, handsome and picturesque in a costume that was yet conventional. He diffused the odor of a powerful, agreeable, distinctly feminine perfume. The feminine details of his toilet made his strong body and aggressive face seem the more masculine; his face, his virile, clean, blond beard, his massive shoulders, on the other hand, made his perfume, his plaited shirt and flowing tie, his several gorgeous rings and his too neat boots seem the more flauntingly feminine. "What I saw of you," he proceeded, "and what your cousin told me, roused my interest and my curiosity."

At "curiosity" his clear, boyish eyes danced and his smile showed even, very white teeth and part of the interior of a too ruddy, too healthily red mouth. Like everything about him that was characteristic, this smile both fascinated and repelled. Evidently this man drew an intense physical joy from life, had made of his intellect an expert extractor of the last sweet drop of pleasure that could be got from perfectly healthy, monstrously acute nerves. When he used any nerve, any of those trained servants of his sybarite passions, it was no careless, ignorant performance such as ordinary mortals are content with. It was a finished and perfect work of art—and somehow suggestive of a tiger licking its chops and fangs and claws and fur that it might not lose a shred of its victim's flesh. But this impression of repulsion was fleeting; the charm of the personality carried off, where it did not conceal, the sinister side. Because Boris understood his fellow beings, especially the women, so thoroughly, they could not but think him sympathetic, could not appreciate that he lured them into exposing or releasing their emotions solely for his own enjoyment.

But Neva was seeing the artist so vividly that she was seeing the man not at all. Only those capable of real enthusiasm can appreciate how keenly she both suffered and enjoyed, in the presence of the Boris Raphael who to her meant the incorporeal spirit of the art she loved and served. He, to relieve her embarrassment and to give her time to collect herself, turned his whole attention to her work—a portrait of Molly, the old servant she had brought with her from Battle Field.

He seemed absorbed in the unfinished picture. In fact, he was thinking only of her. By the infection to which highly sensitive people are susceptible, he had become as embarrassed as she. One of the chief sources of his power with women was his ability to be in his own person whatever the particular woman he was seeking happened to be—foolish with the foolish, youthful with the young, wise with the sensible, serpentine with the crafty, coarse with the grossly material, spiritual with the high-minded. He had all natures within himself and could show whichever he pleased.

As he felt Neva's presence, felt the thrill of those moving graces of her figure, the passion that those mysterious veiled eyes of hers inspired, he was still perfectly aware of her defects, all of them, all that must be done before she should be ready to pluck and enjoy. It was one of her bad mornings. Her skin was rather sallow and her eyelids were too heavy. Since she had been in New York, she had adopted saner habits of regular eating and regular exercise than she had had, or had even known about, in Battle Field. She was beginning to understand why most people, especially most women, go to pieces young; and for the sake of her work, not at all because she hoped for or wished for physical beauty, she was taking better care of herself. But latterly she had been all but prostrate before a violent attack of the blues, and had been eating and sleeping irregularly, and not exercising. Thus, only a Boris Raphael would have suspected her possibilities as she stood there, slightly stooped, the sallowness of her skin harmonizing drearily with her long, loose dark-brown blouse, neutral in itself and a neutralizer. He saw at a glance the secret of her having been able to deceive everybody, to conceal herself, even from herself. He felt the discoverer's thrill; his blood fired like knight's at sight of secret, sleeping princess. But he pretended to ignore her as a personality of the opposite sex pole, knowing that to see her and know her as she really was he must not let her suspect she was observed. He reveled in such adventures upon soul privacy, not the least disturbed because they bore a not remote resemblance to that of the spy upon a nymph at the forest pool. He justified himself by arguing that he made no improper use of his discoveries, but laid them upon the high and holy altars of art and love.

Far from being discouraged by the difficulties which Neva was that morning making so obvious, he welcomed the abrupt change from the monotonous beauty of Doris Coventry. She had given him no opportunity for the exercise of his peculiar talents. With her the banquet was ready spread; with this woman practically everything had to be prepared. And what a banquet it would be! When he had developed her beauty, had made her all that nature intended, had taught her self-confidence and the value of externals and had given her the courage to express the ideas and the emotions that now shrank shyly behind those marvelous eyes of hers— How poor, how paltry, how tedious seemed such adventures as that with Doris Coventry beside this he was now entering!

As if he were her teacher, he took up the palette and with her long-handled brushes made a dozen light, swift touches—what would have been an intolerable insolence in a less than he. To be master was but asserting his natural right; men hated him for it, but the women liked him and it.

"Oh!" she cried delightedly as she observed the result of what he had done. Then, at the contrast between his work and her own, cried "Oh," again, but despondently.

"You must let me teach you," said he, as if addressing the talent revealed in her picture.

"Do you think I could learn?" she asked wistfully.

He elevated his shoulders and brows. "We must all push on until we reach our limit; and until we reach it, we, nor no man, can say where it is."

"But I've no right to your time," she said reluctantly.

"I teach to learn. I teach only those from whom I get more than I give. You see," with his engaging boyish smile, "I have the mercantile instinct."

She looked at him doubtfully, searching for the motive behind an offer, so curious, so improbable in and of itself. She saw before her now the outward and visible form of the genius she revered—a very handsome man, a man whose knowledge how to make himself agreeable to women must obviously have been got by much and intimate experience; a man whose sensuous eyes and obstreperous masculinity of thick waving hair and thick crisp reddish beard, roused in her the distrust bred by ages on ages of enforced female wariness of the male that is ever on conquest bent and is never so completely conqueror as when conquered. But this primordial instinct, never developed in her by experience, was feeble, was immediately silenced by the aspect of him which she clearly understood—his look of breadth and luminousness and simplicity, the master's eye and the master's air—the great man.

"You will teach me more than I you," he insisted.

"Why?" she managed to object, wondering at her own courage as much as at his condescension—for such an offer from such a man was, she felt, indeed a condescension.

"Because you paint with your heart while I paint rather with my head."

"But that is the greater."

"No. It is simply different. Neither is great."

"Neither?"

"Only he is supremely great who works with both heart and mind."

She showed how well she understood, by saying, "Leonardo, for example?"

Boris's face was the devotee's at mention of the god. The worldliness, the aggressive animality vanished. "Leonardo alone among painters," said he. "And he reached the pinnacle in one picture only—the picture of the woman he loved yet judged."

Her own expression had changed. The least observant would have seen just then why Boris, connoisseur, had paused before her. She had dropped her mask, had come forth as the shy beauties of the field lift their heads above the snow in response to the sun of early spring. For the first time in her life she had met a human being to whom life meant precisely what it had meant to her. His own expression of exaltation passed with the impulse that had given it birth; but she did not see. He was for her Boris Raphael, artist through and through. Instead of suspicion and shrinking, her long narrow eyes, luminous, mysterious, now expressed confidence; she would never again be afraid of one who had in him what this man had revealed to her. She had always seen it in his work; she greeted it in the man himself as one greets an old, a stanch friend, tested in moods and times of sorrow and trial.

He glanced at her, glanced hastily away lest she should realize how close he had thus quickly got to her soul, shy and graceful and resplendent as a flamingo. "You will let me teach you?" said he.

"I don't understand your asking."

"Nor do I," replied he. "All I know is, I felt I must come and offer my services. It only remains for you to obey your impulse to accept."

Without further hesitation she accepted; and there was firmly established the intimate relations of master workman and apprentice, with painting, and through painting the whole of life, as the trade, to be learned. For, the arts are a group of sister peaks commanding the entire panorama of truth and beauty, of action and repose; and to learn of a master at any one of them is to be pupil to all wisdom.

Boris arranged with her to come three mornings a week to the atelier, raftered and galleried, which he had made of the top stories of two quaint old houses in Chelsea's one remaining green square. Soon he was seeing her several afternoons also, at her apartment; and they were lunching and dining together, both alone and in the company of artists and the sort of fashionable serious-idle people who seek the society of artists. The part of her shyness that was merely strangeness did not long withstand his easy, sympathetic manner, his simplicity, his adroitness at drawing out the best in any person with whom he took pains to exert himself. It required much clever maneuvering before he got her rid of the shyness that came from lack of belief in her power to interest others. The people out West, inexpert in the social art, awkward and shy with each other, often in intimate family life even, had without in the least intending it, encouraged her and confirmed her in this depressing disbelief. In all her life she had never been so well acquainted with anyone as with Boris after a week of the lessons; and with him, even after two months of friendship, she would suddenly and unaccountably close up like a sensitive plant, be embarrassed and constrained, feel and act as if he were a stranger. Self-confidence finally came through others, not at all through him. Her new acquaintances, observant, sympathetic, quickly saw what Boris pointed out to them; and by their manner, by their many and urgent invitations and similar delicate indirect compliments, they made her feel without realizing it that she was not merely tolerated for his sake, but was sought on her own account.

We hear much of the effect of things internal, little of the far more potent effect of externals. Boris, frankly materialistic, was all for externals. For him the external was not only the sign of what was within, but also was actually its creator. He believed that character was more accurately revealed in dress than in conversation, in manners than in professions. "Show me through a woman's living place," he often said, "and I will tell you more about her soul than she could tell her confessor." His one interest in Neva was her physical beauty; his one object, to develop it to the utmost of the possibilities he alone saw. But he was in no hurry. He had the assiduous patience of genius that works steadily and puts deliberate thought into every stroke. He would not spoil his creation by haste; he would not rob himself of a single one of the joys of anticipation. And his pleasure was enhanced by the knowledge that if she so much as suspected his real design, or any design at all, she would shut herself away beyond his reach.

"I want you as a model," said he one day, in the offhand manner he used with her to conceal direct personal purpose. "But you've got to make changes in your appearance—dress—way of wearing the hair—all that."

She alarmed him by coloring vividly; he had no suspicion that it was because she had been secretly using him as a model for several months. "I've hurt your vanity?" said he. "Well, I never before knew you had that sort of vanity. I fancied you gave the least possible attention to your outside."

"I'll be glad to help you in any way," she hastened to assure him. "You're quite wrong about my reason for not accepting at once. It wasn't wounded vanity.... I don't know whether I have much vanity or not. I've never thought about it."

He laughed. "Well, you will have, when you've seen the picture I'll make. What a queer, puritanic lot you Westerners are!" He seated himself at ease astride a chair, and gazed at her impersonally, as artist at model in whom interest is severely professional. "I suppose you don't know you are a very beautiful woman—or could be if you half tried."

"No, I don't," replied she indifferently. "What do you wish me to do?"

"To become beautiful."

"Don't tease me," said she curtly. "I hate my looks. I never see myself if I can help it."

He took the master's tone with her. "You will kindly keep this away from the personal," reprimanded he. "I am discussing you as a model. I've no interest in your vanity or lack of it."

She resumed her place as pupil with a meek "I beg your pardon."

"First, I want you to spend time in looking at yourself in the glass and in thinking about yourself, your personal appearance. I want you to do this, so that you may be of use to me. But you really ought to do it for your own sake. If you are to be an artist, you must live. To live you must use to its fullest capacity every advantage nature has given you. The more you give others, the more you will receive. It is not to your credit that you don't think about dress or study yourself in the mirror. The reverse. If you are homely, thought and attention will make you less so. If you are beautiful, or could be— What a crime to add to the unsightliness of the world when one might add to its sightliness! And what an impertinence to search for, to cry for beauty, and to refuse to do your own part."

"I hadn't thought of it in that way," confessed she, evidently impressed by this unanswerable logic.

He eyed her professionally through the smoke of his cigarette. "If you are to help me with the picture I have in mind, you'll have to change your hair—for the next few months. Your way of wearing it, I mean—though that will change the color too—or, rather, bring out the color."

Neva colored with embarrassment, remembered she was but a model, braced herself resolutely.

"For my purposes— Just stand before that mirror there." He indicated the great mirror which gave him double the width of the atelier as perspective for his work. "Now, you'll observe that by braiding your hair and putting it on top of your head, you ruin the lines I wish to bring out. The beautiful and the grotesque are very close to each other. Your face and figure ought to be notable as an exhibit of beautiful lengths. But when you put your hair on top of your head, you extend the long lines of neck and face too far—at least, for my purposes."

"I see," said she, herself quite forgotten; for, his impersonal manner was completely convincing, and his exposition of the principles of art was as important as novel and interesting.

"Do your hair well down toward the nape of the neck—and loosely. Somewhat as it was that night at the Morrises, only—more so."

"I'll try it," she said with what sounded hopefully like the beginnings of acquiescence.

"That's better!" exclaimed he, in approval of her docile tone. "And keep on trying till you get it right. You'll know. You've got good taste. If you hadn't, it'd be useless to talk these things to you. The thing is to bring out your natural good taste—to encourage, to educate, instead of repressing it.... No, don't turn away, yet. I want you to notice some color effects. That dress you have on— You always wear clothes that are severely somber, almost funereal—quite funereal. One would think, to look at your garb, that there was no laughter anywhere in you—no possibilities of laughter."

Neva's laughing face, looking at him by way of the mirror, showed that she was now in just the mood he wished. "I want to make a very human picture," he went on. "And, while the dominant note of the human aspect in repose is serious—pensive to tragic—it is relieved by suggestions of laughter. Your dress makes your sadness look depressed, resigned, chronic. Yet you yourself are strong and cheerful and brave. You do not whimper. Why look as if you did, and by infection depress others? Don't you think we owe it to a sad world to contribute whatever of lightness we can?"

She nodded. "I hadn't thought of that," said she.

"Well, don't you think it's about time you did? ... Now, please observe that you wear clothes with too many short lines in their making—lines that contradict the long lines of your head and body."

She whirled away from the mirror, hung her head, with color high and hands nervous. "Don't, please," she said. "You are making me miserably self-conscious."

"Oh, very well." He seemed offended, hurt. "I see you've misunderstood. How can I get any good out of you as a model unless you let me be frank? Why drag self, your personal feelings, to the fore? That is not art."

A long silence, during which she watched him as he scowled at his cigarette. "I'm sorry," she exclaimed contritely. "I'm both ungracious and ungrateful."

"Vanity, I call it," he said, with pretended disdain. "Plain vanity—and cheap, and altogether unworthy of you."

"Go on, please," she urged. "I'll not give you further trouble." Then she added, to his secret delight, "Only, please don't ask me to look at myself before you—until—until—I've had a chance to improve a little."

"To go back to the hair again," pursued he, concealing his satisfaction over his victory. "My notion—for my picture—is much less severe than you are habitually—in appearance, I mean. The hair must be easy, graceful, loose. It must form a background for the face, a crown for the figure. And I want all the colors and shades you now hide away in those plaits." He surveyed her absently. "I'm not sure whether I shall paint you in high or low neck. Get both kinds of dresses—along the lines I've indicated.... Have them made; don't buy those ready-to-wear things you waste money on now.... I want to be able to study you at leisure. So, you'll have to put aside that prim, puritanic costume for a while. You won't mind?"

She had her face turned away. She simply shook her head in answer.

"I know you despise these exterior things—so far as you personally are concerned," he proceeded in a kindlier tone. "I've no quarrel with that. My own views are different. You pride yourself on being free from all social ties or obligations——"

"Not at all," cried she. "Indeed, I'm not so egotistical."

"Egotism!" He waved it away. "A mere word. It simply means human nature with the blinds up. And modesty is human nature with the blinds down. We are all egotists. How is it possible for us not to be? Does not the universe begin when we are born and end when we die? Certainly, you are an egotist. But you are very short-sighted in your egotism, my friend."

"Yes?" She was all attention now.

"You want many things in the world—things you can't get for yourself—things you must therefore look to others to help you get. You want reputation, friendship, love, to name the three principal wants, bread being provided for you. Well—your problem is how to get them in fullest measure and in the briefest time—for, your wants are great and pressing, and life is short."

"But I must have them by fair means and they must be really mine. I don't want what mere externals attract."

"Pish! Tush! Tommy rot!" Boris left the chair, took the middle of the floor and the manner of the instructor of a class. "To get them you must use to the best advantage all the gifts nature has given you—at least, you will, if you are wise, I think. Some of these gifts are internal, some are external. We are each of us encased in matter, and we get contact with each other only by means of matter. Externals are therefore important, are they not? To attract others, those of the kind we like, we must develop our external to be as pleasing as possible to them. In general, we owe it to our fellow beings to be as sightly a part of the view as we can. In particular, we owe it to ourselves to make the best of our minds and bodies, for our own pleasure and to attract those who are congenial to us and can do us the most good."

"I shall have to think about that," said she, and he saw that she was more than half converted. "I've always been taught to regard those things as trivial."

"Trivial! Another word that means nothing. Life—this life—is all we have. How can anything that makes for its happiness or unhappiness be trivial? You with your passion for beauty would have everything beautiful, exquisite, except yourself! What selfishness! You don't care about your own appearance because you don't see it."

She laughed. "Really, am I so bad as all that?"

"The trouble with you is, you haven't thought about these things, but have accepted the judgment of others about them. And what others? Why, sheep, cattle, parrots—the doddering dolts who make public opinion in any given place or at any given time."

She nodded slowly, thoughtfully.

"Another point. You are trying to have a career. Now, that's something new in the world—for women to have careers. You face at best a hard enough struggle. You must do very superior work indeed, to convince anyone you are entitled to equal consideration with men as a worker. Why handicap yourself by creating an impression that you are eccentric, bizarre?"

Neva looked astonished. "I don't understand," said she.

"What is the normal mode for a woman? To be feminine—careful of her looks, fond of dress, as pleasing to the eye as possible. Do you strive to be normal in every way but the one way of making a career, and so force people to see you're a real woman, a well-balanced human being?"

Neva had the expression of one in the dark, toward whom light is beginning to glimmer.

"A woman," proceeded he, the impersonal instructor, "a woman going in for a career and so, laying herself open to suspicion of being 'strong-minded' and 'masculine' and all sorts of hard, unsympathetic, unfeminine things that are to the mutton-headed a sign of want of balance—a woman should be careful to remove that impression. How? By being ultra-feminine, most fashionable in dress, most alluring in appearance— Do you follow me?"

"Perfectly," said Neva. "You've given me a great deal to think about.... Why, how blind we are to the obvious! Now that I see it, I feel like a fool."

"Use the same good taste in your own appearance that you use in bringing out beauty in your surroundings. Note that——"

Boris paused abruptly; his passion was betraying itself both in his eyes and in his voice. But he saw that Neva had, as usual, forgotten the teacher in the lesson. He felt relieved, yet irritated, too. Never before had he found a woman who could maintain, outwardly at least, the fiction of friendship unalloyed with passion. "She acts exactly as if she were another man," said he discontentedly to himself, "except when she treats me as if I were another woman."

He did not return to the subject of her appearance. And his judgment that he had said enough—and his confidence in her good taste—were confirmed a few days later. She came in a new hat, a new blouse, and with her hair done as he had suggested. The changes were in themselves slight; but now that her complexion had been cleared and taken on its proper color—a healthy pallor that made her eyes sparkle and glow, every little change for the better wrought marvels. A good complexion alone has redeemed many a woman from downright ugliness; Neva's complexion now gave her regular features and blue-white teeth and changeful, mysterious eyes their opportunity. The new blouse, one of the prettiest he had ever seen, took away the pinched-in look across the shoulders to which he had objected. As for her hair, it was no longer a mélange of light brown and dark brown, but a halo of harmonizing tints from deepest red to brightest gold, a merry playground for sunbeams. He was astounded, startled. "Why, she has really marvelous hair!" he muttered. Then he laughed aloud; she, watching him for signs of his opinion, wore an expression like a child's before its sphinxlike teacher. She echoed his laugh.

"My advice about the mirror was not so bad, eh?" said he.

"No, indeed," replied she, with the first gleam of coquetry he had ever seen.