Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley would come for Charmian and herself in
her carriage; but when they went down to her in the Synthesis office,
they found that she had planned to walk with them to Ludlow's studio.
She said it was not a great way off; and she had got into the habit of
walking there, when he was painting her; she supposed they would rather
walk after their work. Cornelia said "Oh, yes," and Charmian asked, at
her perfervidest, Had Mr. Ludlow painted _her_? and Mrs. Westley
answered calmly. Yes; she believed he did not think it very successful;
her husband liked it, though. Charmian said, Oh, how much she should
like to see it, and Mrs. Westley said she must show it her some time.
Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley very pretty, but she decided that she did
not care to see Ludlow's picture of her.
His studio stood a little back from the sidewalk; it was approached by
a broad sloping pavement, and had two wide valves for the doorway. He
opened the door himself, at their ring, and they found themselves in a
large, gray room which went to the roof, with its vaulted ceiling; this
was pierced with a vast window, that descended half-way down the
northward wall. "My studio started in life as a gentleman's stable;
then it fell into the hands of a sculptor, and then it got as low as a
painter." He said to Charmian, "Mr. Plaisdell has told me how
ingeniously you treated one of your rooms that you took for a studio."
Charmian answered with dark humility, "But a studio without a painter
in it!" and there were some offers and refusals of compliment between
them, which ended in his saying that he would like to see her studio,
and her saying that Mrs. Maybough would always be glad to see him. Then
he talked with Mrs. Westley, who was very pleasant to Cornelia while
the banter with Charmian went on, and proposed to show his pictures; he
fancied that was what he had got them there, for; but he would make a
decent pretence of the Manet, first.
The Manet was one of that painter's most excessive; it was almost
insolent in its defiance of the old theory and method of art. "He had
to go too far, in those days, or he wouldn't have arrived anywhere,"
Ludlow said, dreamily, as he stood looking with them at the picture.
"He fell back to the point he had really meant to reach." He put the
picture away amidst the sighs and murmurs of Mrs. Westley and Charmian,
and the silence of Cornelia, which he did not try to break. He began to
show his own pictures, taking them at random, as it seemed, from the
ranks of canvasses faced against the wall. "You know we impressionists
are nothing if not prolific," he said, and he kept turning the frame on
his easel, now for a long picture, and now for a tall one. The praises
of the others followed him, but Cornelia could not speak. Some of the
pictures she did not like; some she thought were preposterous; but
there were some that she found brilliantly successful, and a few that
charmed her with their delicate and tender poetry. He said something
about most of them, in apology or extenuation; Cornelia believed that
she knew which he liked by his not saying anything of them.
Suddenly he set a large picture on the easel that quite filled the
frame. "Trotting Match at the Pymantoning County Fair," he announced,
and he turned away and began to make tea in a little battered copper
kettle over a spirit-lamp, on a table strewn with color-tubes in the
corner.
"Ah, yes," said Mrs. Westley. "I remember this at the American Artists;
three or four years ago, wasn't it? But you've done something to it,
haven't you?"
"Improved with age," said Ludlow, with his back toward them, bent above
his tea-kettle. "That's all."
"It seems like painting a weed, though," said Charmian. "How can you
care for such subjects?"
Ludlow came up to her with the first cup of tea. "It's no use to paint
lilies, you know."
"Do you call that an answer?"
"A poor one."
He brought Mrs. Westley some tea, and then he came to Cornelia with a
cup in each hand, one for her, and one for himself, and frankly put
himself between her and the others. "Well, what do you think of it?" he
asked, as if there were no one else but they two.
She felt a warm flush of pleasure in his boldness. "I don't know. It's
like it; that's the way I've always seen it; and it's beautiful. But
somehow----"
"What?"
"It looks as if it were somewhere else."
"You've hit it," said Ludlow. "It serves me right. You see I was so
anxious to prove that an American subject was just as susceptible of
impressionistic treatment as a French one, that I made this look as
French as I could. I must do it again and more modestly; not be so
patronizing. I should like to come out there next fall again, and see
another trotting-match. I suppose they'll have one?"
"They always have them; it wouldn't be the Fair without them," said
Cornelia.
"Well, I must come, and somehow do it on the spot; that's the only
way." He pulled himself more directly in front of her and ignored the
others, who talked about his picture with faded interest to each other,
and then went about, and looked at the objects in the studio. "I don't
think I made myself quite clear the other day, about what I wanted to
do in this way." He plunged into the affair again, and if Cornelia did
not understand it better, it was not for want of explanation. Perhaps
she did not listen very closely. All the time she thought how
brilliantly handsome he was, and how fine, by every worldly criterion.
"Yes," he said, "that is something I have been thinking of ever since
my picture failed with the public; it deserved to fail, and you've made
it so clear why, that I can't refuse to know, or to keep myself in the
dark about it any longer. I don't believe we can take much from the
common stock of life in any way, and find the thing at all real in our
hands, without intending to give something back. Do you?"
Cornelia had never thought about it before; she did not try to pretend
that she had; it seemed a little fantastic to her, but it flattered her
to have him talk to her about it, and she liked his seriousness. He did
not keep up the kind of banter with her that he did with Charmian; he
did not pay her compliments, and she hated compliments from men.
Ludlow went off to speak to Mrs. Westley of something he saw her
looking at; Charmian edged nearer to Cornelia. "I would give the world
to be in your place. I never saw anything like it. Keep on looking just
as you are! It's magnificent. Such color, and that queenly pose of the
head! It would kill those Synthesis girls if they knew how he had been
talking to you. My, if I could get anybody to be serious with _me_!
Talk! Say something! _Do you think its going to rain before we get
home?_ His eyes keep turning this way, all the time; you can't see
them, but they do. _I am glad I brought my umbrella. Have you got your
waterproof?_ I'm going to make you tell me every word he said when he
came to see you yesterday; it'll be mean if you don't. _No, I think I
shall go up by the elevated, and then take the surface-car across._
It's the most romantic thing I ever heard of. _No, I don't believe it
will be dark._ Speak! Say something! You mustn't let me do all the
talking; he'll notice."
Cornelia began to laugh, and Charmian turned away and joined Mrs.
Westley and Ludlow, who were tilting outward some of the canvasses
faced against the wall, and talking them over. Cornelia followed her,
and they all four loitered over the paintings, luxuriously giving a
glance at each, and saying a word or two about it. "Yes," Ludlow said,
"sometimes I used to do three or four of them a day. I work more slowly
now; if you want to get any thinking in, you've got to take time to
it."
It was growing dark; Ludlow proposed to see them all home one after
another. Mrs. Westley said no, indeed; the Broadway car, at the end of
the second block, would leave her within three minutes of her door.
"And nothing could happen in three minutes," said Ludlow. "That stands
to reason."
"And _my_ one luxury is going home alone," said Charmian. "Mamma
doesn't allow it, except to and from the Synthesis. Then I'm an art
student and perfectly safe. If I were a young lady my life wouldn't be
worth anything."
"Yes," Ludlow assented, "the great thing is to have some sort of
business to be where you are."
"I know a girl who's in some of the charities, and she goes about at
all hours of the night, and nobody speaks to her," said Charmian.
"Well, then," said Ludlow, "I don't see that there's anything for me to
do, unless we all go together with Mrs. Wesley to get her Broadway car,
and then keep on to the Elevated with you, Miss Maybough. Miss Saunders
may be frightened enough then to let me walk to her door with her. A
man likes to be of some little use in the world."
They had some mild fun about the weakness of Cornelia in needing an
escort. She found it best to own that she did not quite know her way
home, and was afraid to ask if she got puzzled.
Ludlow put out his spirit-lamp, which had been burning blue all the
time, and embittering the tea in the kettle over it, and then they
carried out their plan. Cornelia went before with Mrs. Westley, who
asked her to come to her on her day, whenever she could leave her work
for such a reckless dissipation. At the foot of the Elevated station
stairs, where Charmian inflexibly required that they should part with
her, in the interest of the personal liberty which she prized above
personal safety, she embraced Cornelia formally, and then added an
embrace of a more specific character, and whispered to her ear, "You're
glorious!" and fled up the station stairs.
Cornelia understood that she was glorious because Mr. Ludlow was
walking home with her, and that Charmian was giving the fact a
significance out of all reason. They talked rather soberly, as two
people do when a gayer third has left them, and they had little
silences. They spoke of Charmian, and Cornelia praised her beauty and
her heart, and said how everybody liked her at the Synthesis.
"Do they laugh at her a little, too?" Ludlow asked.
"Why?"
"She's rather romantic."
"Oh, I thought all girls were romantic."
"Yes? You're not."
"What makes you think so?" asked the girl. "I'm a great deal more
romantic than is good for me. Don't you like romantic people? I do!"
"I don't believe I do," said Ludlow. "They're rather apt to make
trouble. I don't mean Miss Maybough. She'll probably take it out in
madly impossible art. Can she draw?"
Cornelia did not like to say what she thought of Charmian's drawing,
exactly. She said, "Well, I don't know."
Ludlow hastened to say, "I oughtn't to have asked that about your
friend."
"We're both in the Preparatory, you know," Cornelia explained. "I think
Charmian has a great deal of imagination."
"Well, that's a good thing, if it doesn't go too far. Fortunately it
can't, in the Preparatory."
At her door Cornelia did not know whether to ask him in, as she would
have done in Pymantoning; she ended by not even offering him her hand;
but he took it all the same, as if he had expected her to offer it.