Paula had a scheme for interesting women in bond buying. It was a good
scheme. She suggested it so that Dirk thought he had thought of it. Dirk
was head now of the bond department in the Great Lakes Trust Company’s
magnificent new white building on Michigan Boulevard north. Its white
towers gleamed pink in the lake mists. Dirk said it was a terrible
building, badly proportioned, and that it looked like a vast vanilla
sundae. His new private domain was more like a splendid bookless library
than a business office. It was finished in rich dull walnut and there
were great upholstered chairs, soft rugs, shaded lights. Special
attention was paid to women clients. There was a room for their
convenience fitted with low restful chairs and couches, lamps, writing
desks, in mauve and rose. Paula had selected the furnishings for this
room. Ten years earlier it would have been considered absurd in a suite
of business offices. Now it was a routine part of the equipment.
Dirk’s private office was almost as difficult of access as that of the
nation’s executive. Cards, telephones, office boys, secretaries stood
between the caller and Dirk DeJong, head of the bond department. You
asked for him, uttering his name in the ear of the six-foot statuesque
detective who, in the guise of usher, stood in the centre of the marble
rotunda eyeing each visitor with a coldly appraising gaze. This one
padded softly ahead of you on rubber heels, only to give you over to the
care of a glorified office boy who took your name. You waited. He
returned. You waited. Presently there appeared a young woman with
inquiring eyebrows. She conversed with you. She vanished. You waited.
She reappeared. You were ushered into Dirk DeJong’s large and luxurious
inner office. And there formality fled.
Dirk was glad to see you; quietly, interestedly glad to see you. As you
stated your business he listened attentively, as was his charming way.
The volume of business done with women clients by the Great Lakes Trust
Company was enormous. Dirk was conservative, helpful—and he always got
the business. He talked little. He was amazingly effective. Ladies in
the modish black of recent bereavement made quite a sombre procession to
his door. His suggestions (often originating with Paula) made the Great
Lakes Trust Company’s discreet advertising rich in results. Neat little
pamphlets written for women on the subjects of saving, investments. “You
are not dealing with a soulless corporation,” said these brochures. “May
we serve you? You need more than friends. Before acting, you should have
your judgment vindicated by an organization of investment specialists.
You may have relatives and friends, some of whom would gladly advise you
on investments. But perhaps you rightly feel that the less they know
about your financial affairs, the better. To handle trusts, and to care
for the securities of widows and orphans, is our business.”
It was startling to note how this sort of thing mounted into millions.
“Women are becoming more and more used to the handling of money,” Paula
said, shrewdly. “Pretty soon their patronage is going to be as valuable
as that of men. The average woman doesn’t know about bonds—about bond
buying. They think they’re something mysterious and risky. They ought to
be educated up to it. Didn’t you say something, Dirk, about classes in
finance for women? You could make a sort of semi-social affair of it.
Send out invitations and get various bankers—big men, whose names are
known—to talk to these women.”
“But would the women come?”
“Of course they’d come. Women will accept any invitation that’s engraved
on heavy cream paper.”
The Great Lakes Trust had a branch in Cleveland now, and one in New
York, on Fifth Avenue. The drive to interest women in bond buying and to
instruct them in finance was to take on almost national proportions.
There was to be newspaper and magazine advertising.
The Talks for Women on the Subject of Finance were held every two weeks
in the crystal room of the Blackstone and were a great success. Paula
was right. Much of old Aug Hempel’s shrewdness and business foresight
had descended to her. The women came—widows with money to invest;
business women who had thriftily saved a portion of their salaries;
moneyed women who wanted to manage their own property, or who resented a
husband’s interference. Some came out of curiosity. Others for lack of
anything better to do. Others to gaze on the well-known banker or lawyer
or business man who was scheduled to address the meeting. Dirk spoke
three or four times during the winter and was markedly a favourite. The
women, in smart crêpe gowns and tailored suits and small chic hats,
twittered and murmured about him, even while they sensibly digested his
well-thought-out remarks. He looked very handsome, clean-cut, and
distinguished there on the platform in his admirably tailored clothes, a
small white flower in his buttonhole. He talked easily, clearly,
fluently; answered the questions put to him afterward with just the
right mixture of thoughtful hesitation and confidence.
It was decided that for the national advertising there must be an
illustration that would catch the eye of women, and interest them. The
person to do it, Dirk thought, was this Dallas O’Mara whose queer
hen-track signature you saw scrawled on half the advertising
illustrations that caught your eye. Paula had not been enthusiastic
about this idea.
“M-m-m, she’s very good,” Paula had said, guardedly, “but aren’t there
others who are better?”
“She!” Dirk had exclaimed. “Is it a woman? I didn’t know. That name
might be anything.”
“Oh, yes, she’s a woman. She’s said to be very—very attractive.”
Dirk sent for Dallas O’Mara. She replied, suggesting an appointment two
weeks from that date. Dirk decided not to wait, consulted other
commercial artists, looked at their work, heard their plans outlined,
and was satisfied with none of them. The time was short. Ten days had
passed. He had his secretary call Dallas O’Mara on the telephone. Could
she come down to see him that day at eleven?
No: she worked until four daily at her studio.
Could she come to his office at four-thirty, then?
Yes, but wouldn’t it be better if he could come to her studio where he
could see something of the various types of drawings—oils, or
black-and-white, or crayons. She was working mostly in crayons now.
All this relayed by his secretary at the telephone to Dirk at his desk.
He jammed his cigarette-end viciously into a tray, blew a final
infuriated wraith of smoke, and picked up the telephone connection on
his own desk. “One of those damned temperamental near-artists trying to
be grand,” he muttered, his hand over the mouthpiece. “Here, Miss
Rawlings—I’ll talk to her. Switch her over.”
“Hello, Miss—uh—O’Mara. This is Mr. DeJong talking. I much prefer that
you come to my office and talk to me.” (No more of this nonsense.)
Her voice: “Certainly, if you prefer it. I thought the other would save
us both some time. I’ll be there at four-thirty.” Her voice was
leisurely, low, rounded. An admirable voice. Restful.
“Very well. Four-thirty,” said Dirk, crisply. Jerked the receiver onto
the hook. That was the way to handle ’em. These females of forty with
straggling hair and a bundle of drawings under their arm.
The female of forty with straggling hair and a bundle of drawings under
her arm was announced at four-thirty to the dot. Dirk let her wait five
minutes in the outer office, being still a little annoyed. At
four-thirty-five there entered his private office a tall slim girl in a
smart little broadtail jacket, fur-trimmed skirt, and a black hat at
once so daring and so simple that even a man must recognize its French
nativity. She carried no portfolio of drawings under her arms.
Through the man’s mind flashed a series of unbusinesslike thoughts such
as: “Gosh! . . . Eyes! . . . That’s way I like to see girl dress . . .
Tired looking . . . No, guess it’s her eyes—sort of fatigued. . . .
Pretty . . . No, she isn’t . . . yes, she . . .” Aloud he said, “This is
very kind of you, Miss O’Mara.” Then he thought that sounded pompous and
said, curtly, “Sit down.”
Miss O’Mara sat down. Miss O’Mara looked at him with her tired deep blue
eyes. Miss O’Mara said nothing. She regarded him pleasantly, quietly,
composedly. He waited for her to say that usually she did not come to
business offices; that she had only twenty minutes to give him; that the
day was warm, or cold; his office handsome; the view over the river
magnificent. Miss O’Mara said nothing, pleasantly. So Dirk began to
talk, rather hurriedly.
Now, this was a new experience for Dirk DeJong. Usually women spoke to
him first and fluently. Quiet women waxed voluble under his silence;
voluble women chattered. Paula always spoke a hundred words to his one.
But here was a woman more silent than he; not sullenly silent, nor
heavily silent, but quietly, composedly, restfully silent.
“I’ll tell you the sort of thing we want, Miss O’Mara.” He told her.
When he had finished she probably would burst out with three or four
plans. The others had done that.
When he had finished she said, “I’ll think about it for a couple of days
while I’m working on something else. I always do. I’m doing an olive
soap picture now. I can begin work on yours Wednesday.”
“But I’d like to see it—that is, I’d like to have an idea of what
you’re planning to do with it.” Did she think he was going to let her go
ahead without consulting his judgment!
“Oh, it will be all right. But drop into the studio if you like. It will
take me about a week, I suppose. I’m over on Ontario in that old studio
building. You’ll know it by the way most of the bricks have fallen out
of the building and are scattered over the sidewalk.” She smiled a slow
wide smile. Her teeth were good but her mouth was too big, he thought.
Nice big warm kind of smile, though. He found himself smiling, too,
sociably. Then he became businesslike again. Very businesslike.
“How much do you—what is your—what would you expect to get for a
drawing such as that?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” said Miss O’Mara.
“Nonsense.” He looked at her then. Perhaps that had been humour. But she
was not smiling. “You mean fifteen hundred for a single drawing?”
“For that sort of thing, yes.”
“I’m afraid we can’t pay that, Miss O’Mara.”
Miss O’Mara stood up. “That is my price.” She was not at all
embarrassed. He realized that he had never seen such effortless
composure. It was he who was fumbling with the objects on his
flat-topped desk—a pen, a sheet of paper, a blotter. “Good-bye, Mr.
DeJong.” She held out a friendly hand. He took it. Her hair was
gold—dull gold, not bright—and coiled in a single great knot at the
back of her head, low. He took her hand. The tired eyes looked up at
him.
“Well, if that’s your price, Miss O’Mara. I wasn’t prepared to pay any
such—but of course I suppose you top-notchers do get crazy prices for
your work.”
“Not any crazier than the prices you top-notchers get.”
“Still, fifteen hundred dollars is quite a lot of money.”
“I think so, too. But then, I’ll always think anything over nine dollars
is quite a lot of money. You see, I used to get twenty-five cents apiece
for sketching hats for Gage’s.”
She was undeniably attractive. “And now you’ve arrived. You’re
successful.”
“Arrived! Heavens, no! I’ve started.”
“Who gets more money than you do for a drawing?”
“Nobody, I suppose.”
“Well, then?”
“Well, then, in another minute I’ll be telling you the story of my
life.”
She smiled again her slow wide smile; turned to leave. Dirk decided that
while most women’s mouths were merely features this girl’s was a
decoration.
She was gone. Miss Ethelinda Quinn _et al._, in the outer office,
appraised the costume of Miss Dallas O’Mara from her made-to-order
footgear to her made-in-France millinery and achieved a lightning mental
reconstruction of their own costumes. Dirk DeJong in the inner office
realized that he had ordered a fifteen-hundred-dollar drawing, sight
unseen, and that Paula was going to ask questions about it.
“Make a note, Miss Rawlings, to call Miss O’Mara’s studio on Thursday.”
In the next few days he learned that a surprising lot of people knew a
surprisingly good deal about this Dallas O’Mara. She hailed from Texas,
hence the absurd name. She was
twenty-eight—twenty-five—thirty-two—thirty-six. She was beautiful.
She was ugly. She was an orphan. She had worked her way through art
school. She had no sense of the value of money. Two years ago she had
achieved sudden success with her drawings. Her ambition was to work in
oils. She toiled like a galley-slave; played like a child; had twenty
beaux and no lover; her friends, men and women, were legion and wandered
in and out of her studio as though it were a public thoroughfare. You
were likely to find there at any hour any one from Bert Colson, the
blackface musical comedy star, to Mrs. Robinson Gilman of Lake Forest
and Paris; from Leo Mahler, first violin with the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra, to Fanny Whipple who designed dresses for Carson’s. She
supported an assortment of unlucky brothers and spineless sisters in
Texas and points west.
Miss Rawlings made an appointment for Thursday at three. Paula said
she’d go with him and went. She dressed for Dallas O’Mara and the result
was undeniably enchanting. Dallas sometimes did a crayon portrait, or
even attempted one in oils. Had got a prize for her portrait of Mrs.
Robinson Gilman at last spring’s portrait exhibit at the Chicago Art
Institute. It was considered something of an achievement to be asked to
pose for her. Paula’s hat had been chosen in deference to her hair and
profile, and the neck line of her gown in deference to hat, hair, and
profile, and her pearls with an eye to all four. The whole defied
competition on the part of Miss Dallas O’Mara.
Miss Dallas O’Mara, in her studio, was perched on a high stool before an
easel with a large tray of assorted crayons at her side. She looked a
sight and didn’t care at all. She greeted Dirk and Paula with a cheerful
friendliness and went right on working. A model, very smartly gowned,
was sitting for her.
“Hello!” said Dallas O’Mara. “This is it. Do you think you’re going to
like it?”
“Oh,” said Dirk. “Is that it?” It was merely the beginning of a drawing
of the smartly gowned model. “Oh, that’s it, is it?” Fifteen hundred
dollars!
“I hope you didn’t think it was going to be a picture of a woman buying
bonds.” She went on working. She squinted one eye, picked up a funny
little mirror thing which she held to one side, looked into, and put
down. She made a black mark on the board with a piece of crayon then
smeared the mark with her thumb. She had on a faded all-enveloping smock
over which French ink, rubber cement, pencil marks, crayon dust and wash
were so impartially distributed that the whole blended and mixed in a
rich mellow haze like the Chicago atmosphere itself. The collar of a
white silk blouse, not especially clean, showed above this. On her feet
were soft kid bedroom slippers, scuffed, with pompons on them. Her dull
gold hair was carelessly rolled into that great loose knot at the back.
Across one cheek was a swipe of black.
“Well,” thought Dirk, “she looks a sight.”
Dallas O’Mara waved a friendly hand toward some chairs on which were
piled hats, odd garments, bristol board and (on the broad arm of one) a
piece of yellow cake. “Sit down.” She called to the girl who had opened
the door to them: “Gilda, will you dump some of those things. This is
Mrs. Storm, Mr. DeJong—Gilda Hanan.” Her secretary, Dirk later learned.
The place was disorderly, comfortable, shabby. A battered grand piano
stood in one corner. A great skylight formed half the ceiling and sloped
down at the north end of the room. A man and a girl sat talking
earnestly on the couch in another corner. A swarthy foreign-looking
chap, vaguely familiar to Dirk, was playing softly at the piano. The
telephone rang. Miss Hanan took the message, transmitted it to Dallas
O’Mara, received the answer, repeated it. Perched atop the stool, one
slippered foot screwed in a rung, Dallas worked on concentratedly,
calmly, earnestly. A lock of hair straggled over her eyes. She pushed it
back with her wrist and left another dark splotch on her forehead. There
was something splendid, something impressive, something magnificent
about her absorption, her indifference to appearance, her unawareness of
outsiders, her concentration on the work before her. Her nose was shiny.
Dirk hadn’t seen a girl with a shiny nose in years. They were always
taking out those little boxes and things and plastering themselves with
the stuff in ’em.
“How can you work with all this crowd around?”
“Oh,” said Dallas in that deep restful leisurely voice of hers, “there
are always between twenty and thirty”—she slapped a quick scarlet line
on the board, rubbed it out at once—“thousand people in and out of here
every hour, just about. I like it. Friends around me while I’m slaving.”
“Gosh!” he thought, “she’s—— I don’t know—she’s——”
“Shall we go?” said Paula.
He had forgotten all about her. “Yes. Yes, I’m ready if you are.”
Outside, “Do you think you’re going to like the picture?” Paula asked.
They stepped into her car.
“Oh, I don’t know. Can’t tell much about it at this stage, I suppose.”
“Back to your office?”
“Sure.”
“Attractive, isn’t she?”
“Think so?”
So he was going to be on his guard, was he! Paula threw in the clutch
viciously, jerked the lever into second speed. “Her neck was dirty.”
“Crayon dust,” said Dirk.
“Not necessarily,” replied Paula.
Dirk turned sideways to look at her. It was as though he saw her for the
first time. She looked brittle, hard, artificial—small, somehow. Not in
physique but in personality.
The picture was finished and delivered within ten days. In that time
Dirk went twice to the studio in Ontario Street. Dallas did not seem to
mind. Neither did she appear particularly interested. She was working
hard both times. Once she looked as he had seen her on her first visit.
The second time she had on a fresh crisp smock of faded yellow that was
glorious with her hair; and high-heeled beige kid slippers, very smart.
She was like a little girl who has just been freshly scrubbed and
dressed in a clean pinafore, Dirk thought.
He thought a good deal about Dallas O’Mara. He found himself talking
about her in what he assumed to be a careless offhand manner. He liked
to talk about her. He told his mother of her. He could let himself go
with Selina and he must have taken advantage of this for she looked at
him intently and said: “I’d like to meet her. I’ve never met a girl like
that.”
“I’ll ask her if she’ll let me bring you up to the studio some time when
you’re in town.”
It was practically impossible to get a minute with her alone. That
irritated him. People were always drifting in and out of the
studio—queer, important, startling people; little, dejected, shabby
people. An impecunious girl art student, red-haired and wistful, that
Dallas was taking in until the girl got some money from home; a
pearl-hung grand-opera singer who was condescending to the Chicago Opera
for a fortnight. He did not know that Dallas played until he came upon
her late one afternoon sitting at the piano in the twilight with Bert
Colson, the blackface comedian. Colson sang those terrible songs about
April showers bringing violets, and about mah Ma-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-my
but they didn’t seem terrible when he sang them. There was about this
lean, hollow-chested, sombre-eyed comedian a poignant pathos, a gorgeous
sense of rhythm—a something unnameable that bound you to him, made you
love him. In the theatre he came out to the edge of the runway and took
the audience in his arms. He talked like a bootblack and sang like an
angel. Dallas at the piano, he leaning over it, were doing “blues.” The
two were rapt, ecstatic. I got the blues—I said the blues—I got the
this or that—the somethingorother—blue—hoo-hoos. They scarcely
noticed Dirk. Dallas had nodded when he came in, and had gone on
playing. Colson sang the cheaply sentimental ballad as though it were
the folksong of a tragic race. His arms were extended, his face rapt. As
Dallas played the tears stood in her eyes. When they had finished,
“Isn’t it a terrible song?” she said. “I’m crazy about it. Bert’s going
to try it out to-night.”
“Who—uh—wrote it?” asked Dirk politely.
Dallas began to play again. “H’m? Oh, I did.” They were off once more.
They paid no more attention to Dirk. Yet there was nothing rude about
their indifference. They simply were more interested in what they were
doing. He left telling himself that he wouldn’t go there again. Hanging
around a studio. But next day he was back.
“Look here, Miss O’Mara,” he had got her alone for a second. “Look here,
will you come out to dinner with me some time? And the theatre?”
“Love to.”
“When?” He was actually trembling.
“To-night.” He had an important engagement. He cast it out of his life.
“To-night! That’s grand. Where do you want to dine? The Casino?” The
smartest club in Chicago; a little pink stucco Italian box of a place on
the Lake Shore Drive. He was rather proud of being in a position to take
her there as his guest.
“Oh, no, I hate those arty little places. I like dining in a hotel full
of all sorts of people. Dining in a club means you’re surrounded by
people who’re pretty much alike. Their membership in the club means
they’re there because they are all interested in golf, or because
they’re university graduates, or belong to the same political party or
write, or paint, or have incomes of over fifty thousand a year, or
something. I like ’em mixed up, higgledy-piggledy. A dining room full of
gamblers, and insurance agents, and actors, and merchants, thieves,
bootleggers, lawyers, kept ladies, wives, flaps, travelling men,
millionaires—everything. That’s what I call dining out. Unless one is
dining at a friend’s house, of course.” A rarely long speech for her.
“Perhaps,” eagerly, “you’ll dine at my little apartment some time. Just
four or six of us, or even——”
“Perhaps.”
“Would you like the Drake to-night?”
“It looks too much like a Roman bath. The pillars scare me. Let’s go to
the Blackstone. I’ll always be sufficiently from Texas to think the
Blackstone French room the last word in elegance.”
They went to the Blackstone. The head waiter knew him. “Good evening,
Mr. DeJong.” Dirk was secretly gratified. Then, with a shock, he
realized that the head waiter was grinning at Dallas and Dallas was
grinning at the head waiter. “Hello, André,” said Dallas.
“Good evening, Miss O’Mara.” The text of his greeting was correct and
befitting the head waiter of the French room at the Blackstone. But his
voice was lyric and his eyes glowed. His manner of seating her at a
table was an enthronement.
At the look in Dirk’s eyes, “I met him in the army,” Dallas explained,
“when I was in France. He’s a grand lad.”
“Were you in—what did you do in France?”
“Oh, odd jobs.”
Her dinner gown was very smart, but the pink ribbon strap of an
under-garment showed untidily at one side. Her silk brassiere, probably.
Paula would have—but then, a thing like that was impossible in Paula’s
perfection of toilette. He loved the way the gown cut sharply away at
the shoulder to show her firm white arms. It was dull gold, the colour
of her hair. This was one Dallas. There were a dozen—a hundred. Yet she
was always the same. You never knew whether you were going to meet the
gamin of the rumpled smock and the smudged face or the beauty of the
little fur jacket. Sometimes Dirk thought she looked like a Swede hired
girl with those high cheek bones of hers and her deep-set eyes and her
large capable hands. Sometimes he thought she looked like the splendid
goddesses you saw in paintings—the kind with high pointed breasts and
gracious gentle pose—holding out a horn of plenty. There was about her
something genuine and earthy and elemental. He noticed that her nails
were short and not well cared for—not glittering and pointed and
cruelly sharp and horridly vermilion, like Paula’s. That pleased him,
too, somehow.
“Some oysters?” he suggested. “They’re perfectly safe here. Or fruit
cocktail? Then breast of guinea hen under glass and an artichoke——”
She looked a little worried. “If you—suppose you take that. Me, I’d
like a steak and some potatoes au gratin and a salad with Russian——”
“That’s fine!” He was delighted. He doubled that order and they consumed
it with devastating thoroughness. She ate rolls. She ate butter. She
made no remarks about the food except to say, once, that it was good and
that she had forgotten to eat lunch because she had been so busy
working. All this Dirk found most restful and refreshing. Usually, when
you dined in a restaurant with a woman she said, “Oh, I’d love to eat
one of those crisp little rolls!”
You said, “Why not?”
Invariably the answer to this was, “I daren’t! Goodness! A half pound at
least. I haven’t eaten a roll with butter in a year.”
Again you said, “Why not?”
“Afraid I’ll get fat.”
Automatically, “You! Nonsense. You’re just right.”
He was bored with these women who talked about their weight, figure,
lines. He thought it in bad taste. Paula was always rigidly refraining
from this or that. It made him uncomfortable to sit at the table facing
her; eating his thorough meal while she nibbled fragile curls of Melba
toast, a lettuce leaf, and half a sugarless grapefruit. It lessened his
enjoyment of his own oysters, steak, coffee. He thought that she always
eyed his food a little avidly, for all her expressed indifference to it.
She was looking a little haggard, too.
“The theatre’s next door,” he said. “Just a step. We don’t have to leave
here until after eight.”
“That’s nice.” She had her cigarette with her coffee in a mellow
sensuous atmosphere of enjoyment. He was talking about himself a good
deal. He felt relaxed, at ease, happy.
“You know I’m an architect—at least, I was one. Perhaps that’s why I
like to hang around your shop so. I get sort of homesick for the pencils
and the drawing board—the whole thing.”
“Why did you give it up, then?”
“Nothing in it.”
“How do you mean—nothing in it?”
“No money. After the war nobody was building. Oh, I suppose if I’d hung
on——”
“And then you became a banker, h’m? Well, there ought to be money enough
in a bank.”
He was a little nettled. “I wasn’t a banker—at first. I was a bond
salesman.”
Her brows met in a little frown. Her eyebrows were thick and strongly
marked and a little uneven and inclined to meet over her nose. Paula’s
brows were a mere line of black—a carefully traced half-parenthesis
above her unmysterious dark eyes. “I’d rather,” Dallas said, slowly,
“plan one back door of a building that’s going to help make this town
beautiful and significant than sell all the bonds that ever floated
a—whatever it is that bonds are supposed to float.”
He defended himself. “I felt that way, too. But you see my mother had
given me my education, really. She worked for it. I couldn’t go dubbing
along, earning just enough to keep me. I wanted to give her things. I
wanted——”
“Did she want those things? Did she want you to give up architecture and
go into bonds?”
“Well—she—I don’t know that she exactly——” He was too decent—still
too much the son of Selina DeJong—to be able to lie about that.
“You said you were going to let me meet her.”
“Would you let me bring her in? Or perhaps you’d even—would you drive
out to the farm with me some day. She’d like that so much.”
“So would I.”
He leaned toward her, suddenly. “Listen, Dallas. What do you think of
me, anyway?” He wanted to know. He couldn’t stand not knowing any
longer.
“I think you’re a nice young man.”
That was terrible. “But I don’t want you to think I’m a nice young man.
I want you to like me—a lot. Tell me, what haven’t I got that you think
I ought to have? Why do you put me off so many times? I never feel that
I’m really near you. What is it I lack?” He was abject.
“Well, if you’re asking for it. I do demand of the people I see often
that they possess at least a splash of splendour in their makeup. Some
people are nine tenths splendour and one tenth tawdriness, like Gene
Meran. And some are nine tenths tawdriness and one tenth splendour, like
Sam Huebch. But some people are all just a nice even pink without a
single patch of royal purple.”
“And that’s me, h’m?”
He was horribly disappointed, hurt, wretched. But a little angry, too.
His pride. Why, he was Dirk DeJong, the most successful of Chicago’s
younger men; the most promising; the most popular. After all, what did
she do but paint commercial pictures for fifteen hundred dollars apiece?
“What happens to the men who fall in love with you? What do they do?”
Dallas stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “They usually tell me about it.”
“And then what?”
“Then they seem to feel better and we become great friends.”
“But don’t you ever fall in love with them?” Pretty damned sure of
herself. “Don’t you ever fall in love with them?”
“I almost always do,” said Dallas.
He plunged. “I could give you a lot of things you haven’t got, purple or
no purple.”
“I’m going to France in April. Paris.”
“What d’you mean! Paris. What for?”
“Study. I want to do portraits. Oils.”
He was terrified. “Can’t you do them here?”
“Oh, no. Not what I need. I have been studying here. I’ve been taking
life-work three nights a week at the Art Institute, just to keep my hand
in.”
“So that’s where you are, evenings.” He was strangely relieved. “Let me
go with you some time, will you?” Anything. Anything.
She took him with her one evening, steering him successfully past the
stern Irishman who guarded the entrance to the basement classrooms; to
her locker, got into her smock, grabbed her brushes. She rushed down the
hall. “Don’t talk,” she cautioned him. “It bothers them. I wonder what
they’d think of my shop.” She turned into a small, cruelly bright,
breathlessly hot little room, its walls whitewashed. Every inch of the
floor space was covered with easels. Before them stood men and women,
brushes in hand, intent. Dallas went directly to her place, fell to work
at once. Dirk blinked in the strong light. He glanced at the dais toward
which they were all gazing from time to time as they worked. On it lay a
nude woman.
To himself Dirk said in a sort of panic: “Why, say, she hasn’t got any
clothes on! My gosh! this is fierce. She hasn’t got anything on!” He
tried, meanwhile, to look easy, careless, critical. Strangely enough, he
succeeded, after the first shock, not only in looking at ease, but
feeling so. The class was doing the whole figure in oils.
The model was a moron with a skin like velvet and rose petals. She fell
into poses that flowed like cream. Her hair was waved in wooden
undulations and her nose was pure vulgarity and her earrings were
drug-store pearls in triple strands but her back was probably finer than
Helen’s and her breasts twin snowdrifts peaked with coral. In twenty
minutes Dirk found himself impersonally interested in tone, shadows,
colours, line. He listened to the low-voiced instructor and squinted
carefully to ascertain whether that shadow on the model’s stomach really
should be painted blue or brown. Even he could see that Dallas’s canvas
was almost insultingly superior to that of the men and women about her.
Beneath the flesh on her canvas there were muscles, and beneath those
muscles blood and bone. You felt she had a surgeon’s knowledge of
anatomy. That, Dirk decided, was what made her commercial pictures so
attractive. The drawing she had done for the Great Lakes Trust Company’s
bond department had been conventional enough in theme. The treatment,
the technique, had made it arresting. He thought that if she ever did
portraits in oils they would be vital and compelling portraits. But oh,
he wished she didn’t want to do portraits in oils. He wished——
It was after eleven when they emerged from the Art Institute doorway and
stood a moment together at the top of the broad steps surveying the
world that lay before them. Dallas said nothing. Suddenly the beauty of
the night rushed up and overwhelmed Dirk. Gorgeousness and tawdriness;
colour and gloom. At the right the white tower of the Wrigley building
rose wraithlike against a background of purple sky. Just this side of it
a swarm of impish electric lights grinned their message in scarlet and
white. In white: