Miss Burns took out her little purse, refusing to let Frederick pay for
her, and they stepped out again into the busy streets.
"By Jove," said Frederick, whose manner when in the hurly-burly changed
completely, "what a lot of stuff I have been chattering! I deserve to be
punished for trying your patience to such an extent. I must have bored
you horribly."
"Oh, no," she said, "I am accustomed to such conversations. I have
associated with artists for many years."
"Do you mean to impugn my truthfulness, Miss Burns?" Frederick asked in
some alarm.
"No, but I think," she said calmly, with almost masculine firmness, "that
if nature makes us suffer through something, she does not intend us to
suffer again and again from the same thing. It seems to me the Creator
had a definite intention in always and everywhere placing night and sleep
between day and day."
"Not always and not everywhere," Frederick observed, thinking of the
difficulty he had had for many nights in snatching a few hours' sleep.
At a street crossing Miss Burns stopped to wait for a car to take her
back to the studio.
"Look at that," said Frederick, pointing to six similar placards of
gigantic dimensions, which represented Mara, the Spider's Victim, in
screaming colours. A green stripe was pasted slantwise on each placard,
announcing that the dancer had been suffering from the consequences of
the shipwreck, but that she would appear at Webster and Forster's the
next day for the first time in America. Above the advertisement on the
same wall were seven or eight full-length pictures of Arthur Stoss larger
than life-size.
"Your little friend invited Mr. Ritter to a rehearsal in a theatre on
Broadway day after to-morrow. It was not Webster and Forster's," said
Miss Burns. Frederick explained what had happened in connection with
Mr. Lilienfeld, though he himself had not known of the intended
rehearsal.
"I feel nothing but pity for that girl," he said lightly. "As a result of
a strange combination of circumstances, I feel I am responsible for her.
She lost her father, who was all in all to her, since she is not on good
terms with her mother."
"Indeed?" said Miss Burns. "Why, this very morning in a short
conversation in the studio, she told me something very different."
"She did!" exclaimed Frederick.
"She told me that in many ways her father had been a fearful burden to
her. In the first place, she had to earn money for him, and then he
tyrannised over her terribly."
"Well," said Frederick, somewhat confused, "it is perhaps the essence of
perversion that a person feels compelled to hoodwink people by doing
things and making statements the very reverse of what is natural and
what is to be expected. Miss Burns, I wish, I heartily wish, you would
look out a little for that poor creature drifting about without anybody
or anything to guide her."
"Good-bye," said Miss Burns, hailing a car. "Come and start work in
the studio as soon as possible. As for your little friend, she is too
self-willed. In fact, she has an iron will. There is no holding her, or
leading her, that would keep her from doing anything she had once made up
her mind to do."
When the car had carried Miss Burns off into the stream of New York
traffic, Frederick, strangely enough, had a fleeting sense of
forlornness, to him a novel sensation. Feeling inclined to taste it to
the full, he continued to walk the streets alone, choosing his way at
random. For the first time after speaking so freely to a comparative
stranger, he did not regret his conduct. Again and again he went over in
his mind his first meeting with Miss Burns in the studio, her manner
during the lively carousal, when they discussed the wooden Madonna, his
second meeting with her on the street, her upright carriage, her proud
eyes, her imposing appearance in the little cosmopolitan restaurant.
Without intending to, she undeniably dominated her surroundings, and that
merely as a result of her naturalness. It had given Frederick secret
pleasure to watch her eat and drink daintily, yet heartily, without any
airs or graces, and systematically dissect her orange and peel her apple.
Eating and drinking was to her a noble, legitimate and also inevitable
act, not to be disposed of lightly beneath a foolish masquerade. When
Frederick recommended Ingigerd to her guidance, he did so because he
himself had experienced a beneficent influence from her remarks, dictated
by a beautiful intellect, and from the glance of her straight, honest,
scrutinising eyes.
"At the risk of making myself ridiculous," he said to himself, "I will go
to Ritter's studio to-morrow morning, bury my hands in the clay, and try
to reconstruct my life again from the bottom up out of moist clay."