Wetmore came the next morning with Ludlow, and looked at Cornelia's
studies. "Well, there's no doubt about her talent. I wonder why it was
wasted on one of her sex! These gifted girls, poor things, there don't
seem to be any real call for them." He turned from the sketches a
moment to the arrangement of Charmian's studio. "I suppose this is the
other girl's expression." He looked more closely at the keeping of the
room, and said, with a smile of mixed compassion and amusement, "Why,
this girl seems to be trying to do the Bohemian act!"
"That is her pose," Ludlow admitted.
"And does she get a great deal of satisfaction out of it?"
"The usual amount I fancy." Ludlow began to tell of some of Charmian's
attempts to realize her ideal.
Wetmore listened with a pitying smile. "Poor thing! It isn't much like
the genuine thing, as we used to see it in Paris, is it? We Americans
are too innocent in our traditions and experiences; our Bohemia is a
non-alcoholic, unfermented condition. When it is diluted down to the
apprehension of an American girl it's no better, or no worse, than a
kind of Arcadia. Miss Maybough ought to go round with a shepherdess's
crook and a straw hat with daisies in it. That's what _she_ wants to
do, if she knew it. Is that a practicable pipe? I suppose those
cigarettes are chocolates in disguise. Well!" He reverted to Cornelia's
canvases. "Why, of course they're good. She's doomed. She will have to
exhibit. You couldn't do less, Ludlow, than have her carry this one a
little farther"--he picked out one of the canvases and set it
apart--"and offer it to the Academy."
"Do you really think so?" asked Ludlow, looking at it gravely.
"I don't know. With the friends you've got on the Committee---- But you
don't suppose I came up here to see these things alone, did you?
Where's _your_ picture?"
"I haven't any," said Ludlow.
"Ob, rubbish! Where's your theory of a picture, then? I don't care what
you call it. My only anxiety, when you got a plain, simple, every-day
conundrum like Miss Maybough to paint, was that you would try to paint
the answer instead of the conundrum, and I dare say that's the trouble.
You've been trying to give something more of her character than you
found in her face; is that it? Well, you deserved to fail, then. You've
been trying to _interpret_ her; to come the prophet! I don't condemn
the poetry in your nature, Ludlow," Wetmore went on, "and if I could
manage it for you, I think I could keep it from doing mischief. That is
why I am so plain-spoken with you."
"Do you call it plain-speaking?" Ludlow said, putting his picture where
it could be seen best. "I was going to accuse you of flattery."
"Well, you had better ponder the weighty truths I have let fall. I
don't go round dropping them on everybody's toes."
"Probably there are not enough of them," Ludlow suggested.
"Oh, yes, there are." Wetmore waited till Ludlow should say he was
ready to have him look at his picture. "The fact is, I've been giving a
good deal of attention to your case, lately. You're not simple enough,
and you've had the wrong training. You would naturally like to paint
the literature of a thing, and let it go at that. But you've studied in
France, where they know better, and you can't bring yourself to do it.
Your nature and your school are at odds. You ought to have studied in
England. They don't know how to paint there, but they've brought
fiction in color to the highest point, and they're not ashamed of it."
"Perhaps you've boon theorizing, too," said Ludlow, stepping aside from
his picture.
"Not on canvas," Wetmore returned. He put himself in the place Ludlow
had just left. "Hello!" he began, but after a glance at Ludlow he went
on, with the effect of having checked himself, to speak carefully and
guardedly of the work in detail. His specific criticism was as gentle
and diffident as his general censure of Ludlow was blunt and outright.
It was given mostly in questions, and in recognitions of intention.
"Well, the sum of it is," said Ludlow at last, "you see it's a
failure."
Wetmore shrugged, as if this were something Ludlow ought not to have
asked. He went back to Cornelia's sketches, and looked at them one
after another. "That girl knows what she's about, or what she wants to
do, and she goes for it every time. She _has_ got talent. Whether she's
got enough to stand the training! That's the great difference, after
all. Lots of people have talent; that's the gift. The question is
whether one has it in paying quantity, or enough of it to amount to
anything after the digging and refining. I should say that girl had,
but very likely I might be mistaken."
Ludlow joined in the examination of the sketches. He put his hand on
the weak points as well as on the strong ones; he enjoyed with Wetmore
the places where her artlessness had frankly offered itself instead of
her art. There was something ingenuous and honest in it all that made
it all charming.
"Yes, I think she can do it," said Wetmore, "if she wants to bad
enough, or if she doesn't want to get married worse."
Ludlow winced. "Isn't there something a little vulgar in that notion of
ours that a woman always wishes first and most of all to get married?"
"My dear boy," said Wetmore, with an affectionate hand on Ludlow's
shoulder, "I never denied being vulgar."
"Oh, I dare say. But I was thinking of myself."
Ludlow sent word to Charmian at the Synthesis that he should not ask
her to sit to him that afternoon, and in the evening he went to see
Wetmore. It was eleven o'clock, and he would have been welcome at
Wetmore's any time between that hour of the night and two of the
morning. He found a number of people. Mrs. Westley was there with Mrs.
Rangeley; they had been at a concert together. Mrs. Wetmore had just
made a Welsh rabbit, and they were all talking of the real meaning of
the word "beautiful."
"_I_ think," Mrs. Rangeley was saying, "that the beautiful is whatever
pleases or fascinates. There are lots of good-looking people who are
not beautiful at all, because they have no atmosphere: and you see
other people, who are irregular, and quite plain even, and yet you come
away feeling that they are perfectly beautiful." Mrs. Rangeley's own
beauty was a little irregular. She looked anxiously round, and caught
Wetmore in a smile. "What are you laughing at?" she demanded in rueful
deprecation.
"Oh, nothing, nothing!" he said. "I was thinking how convincing you
were!"
"Nothing of the kind!" said one of the men, who had been listening
patiently till she fully committed herself. "There couldn't be a more
fallacious notion of the meaning of beauty. The thing exists in itself,
independently of our pleasure or displeasure; they have almost nothing
to do with it. If you mix it with them you are lost, as far as a true
conception of it goes. Beauty is something as absolute as truth, and
whatever varies from it, as it was ascertained, we'll say, by the Greek
sculptors and the Italian painters, is unbeautiful, just as anything
that varies from the truth is untrue. Charm, fascination, atmosphere,
are purely subjective; one feels them and another doesn't. But beauty
is objective, and nobody can deny it who sees it, whether he likes it
or not. You can't get away from it, any more than you can get away from
the truth. There it is!"
"Where?" asked Wetmore. He looked at the ladies as if he thought one of
them had been indicated.
"How delightful to have one's ideas jumped on just as if they were a
man's!" sighed Mrs. Rangeley. Her opponent laughed a generous delight,
as if he liked nothing better than having his reasoning brought to
naught. He entered joyously into the tumult which the utterance of the
different opinions, prejudices and prepossessions of the company
became.
Ludlow escaped from it, and made his way to Mrs. Westley, in that
remoter and quieter corner, which she seemed to find everywhere when
you saw her out of her own house; there she was necessarily prominent.
"I think Mr. Agnew is right, and Mrs. Rangeley is altogether wrong,"
she said. "There couldn't be a better illustration of it than in those
two young art-student friends of yours. Miss Saunders is beautiful in
just that absolute way Mr. Agnew speaks of; you simply can't refuse to
see it; and Miss Maybough is fascinating, if you feel her so. I should
think you'd find her very difficult to paint, and with Miss Saunders
there, all the time, I should be afraid of getting her decided
qualities into my picture."