"We must get at the girl herself," declared Eudoxia,--"that is, if it
isn't too late, if she isn't utterly infatuated with him."
"I don't think I've heard as much as _that_ said," replied Virgilia. She
knew of but one young woman who might justly go to such a length. "What
shall you do first? Shall you ask her to pour tea?"
"No need, yet, of going as far as that. Can't you get together a little
party and give her a sort of lunch out at the Whip and Spur? Then one of
us, I suppose, might call on her mother--if she's got one."
"Whatever you suggest," said Virgilia, with a suppressed sob. "You may
think I'm a perpetual fount of ideas, but I'm not." The Grindstone's
rejection of her second scheme had hurt her cruelly. She put her
handkerchief to her eyes--as if she had become, instead, a fount of
tears.
And as such she next appeared to Dill. "I felt so sure, dear Daff, that
we could put it through," she mourned. "And now--and now----"
Daffingdon drew her discouraged head down against his shoulder, in his
most noble and manful mode. "Let the lions take us, if they will," he
seemed to say, casting his eyes around the arena.
Little O'Grady came over, bearing a martyr's palm. The universal sadness
was reflected in his face. Little Frankie Adams was to go along wearing
his old shoes, and Kitty Gowan, who had been figuring on a belated winter
suit, had tearfully thrown a handful of samples in the fire and put the
fond notion aside.
Little O'Grady wiped a sympathetic eye. "Oh, Daff, I'm so sorry for you;
just at the time, too, when----" He dared not proceed, awed by Dill's
protesting pathos. "Come, now," he ventured presently, "why shouldn't we
let Ignace in on this? He's so inventive; he's so full of ideas----"
Daffingdon recalled the sensuous Oriental masterpiece at the club and saw
no reason why the possessor of such a particular talent could be expected
to succeed in a bank. He shook his head; no member of another sect--no
heretical Viennese--should share his martyrdom with him. This left
Prochnow free to rush upon the lions on his own account. Little O'Grady,
returning to the Rabbit-Hutch, found his neighbour's loins fully girded
for the task--the fine frenzy of inspiration had already turned the place
upside down.
"That's right, Ignace!" he called from the threshold; "sail in. What is
the plan this time?" he asked, tiptoeing along over the scattered sheets
that littered the floor.
Prochnow ran his nervous fingers through his wild black forelock, and
cast on Little O'Grady a piercing, inspirational glance from a pair of
glittering eyes.
"The two great modern forces," he pronounced, "are Science and Democracy.
I shall show how each has contributed to the progress of society. Science
shall have the six lunettes on the right and Democracy the six on the
left."
"H'm," said Little O'Grady; "an allegory?"
"Precisely. No better basis for a grand monumental work."
"Well, Ignace," declared Little O'Grady, "you'll put it through if
anybody can!"
He hurried back to his own room, shrugged himself into his
plaster-flecked blouse of robin's-egg blue, threw "The First Issue of
Wild-Cat Currency" (a group of frontier financiers in chokers and high
beaver hats) back into the clay-box, and began at once on a bold relief
of "Science and Democracy Opening the Way for the Car of Progress."
"Science," he explained to Prochnow, next day, "will be clearing the air
of the bats of ignorance, and Democracy will be clearing the ground of
the imps of aristocracy--or maybe they'll be demons. And between the two,
right in the middle, of course, the Car of Progress will advance in very
low relief. I haven't quite got it all where it will pull together yet,
and I can see the foreshortening of the horses will be something
terrible; but I'm pretty sure I shall find some way out within a week or
so. Let me tell you one thing, though, about your own job, Ignace. Your
allegory will go down easier if----Say, you wouldn't take Hill's hints,
would you?"
"No," said Prochnow, with the loftiest contempt.
"It will go down easier, I say, if you'll just work in some portraits of
our Nine Worthies. Ghirlandajo did that racket, for instance; so did
Holbein. So did plenty of others. Wouldn't Andrew P. Hill's chin-beard
come in great on Fortitude? And if you've got any gratitude in your
composition, Roscoe Orlando ought to go in as Prosperity. Give him two
cornucopias, instead of one, to balance those side-whiskers----"
"Hush!" called Prochnow reprovingly. He never jested about his patrons
and he never made facetious observations about art.
"Well, don't get mad," said Little O'Grady, slightly abashed. "I'm doing
just that thing with Simon Rosenberg; he's going to be my archdemon of
aristocracy."
Prochnow remained smilelessly severe; and Little O'Grady, after one or
two more feeble efforts to save his "face," slunk away--vastly impressed,
as he never failed to be when he met the rare person that could put him
down.
"What makes Ignace so grouchy to-day, I wonder?" he muttered, as he
returned to the Car of Progress.
Prochnow soon forgot this interruption and jumped back into his work with
redoubled vigour. He took a serious view of himself, of his art, of
things in general; above all, he took a serious view of his immediate
future and of the place that Preciosa McNulty might come to have in it.
Little O'Grady, an easygoing bachelor, everybody's friend, and too much
the champion of the whole gentler sex to set any one of its members apart
from all the rest, might indulge in such jestings about his own life and
his own work as he saw fit. But for himself, a man of the warmest and
highest ambitions, yet with the most restricted means for realizing them,
play by the roadside was quite out of the question.