“I — I didn’t know what to say.”

  “Didn’t know!” He paused, astonished. Then: “Well, you felt yourself getting numb, didn’t you?”

  “Y-yes. But I thought it was — to be expected” — she blushed vividly under his astonished gaze: “I think I had better tell you that — that this is — the first time.”

  “The first time!”

  “Yes…. I ought to have told you. I was afraid you might not want me.”

  “Lord above!” he breathed. “You poor — poor little thing!”

  She began to cry silently; he saw the drops fall shining on the white wool robe, and leaned one elbow on the ladder, watching them. After a while they ceased, but she still held her head low, and her face was bent in the warm shadow of her hair.

  “How could I understand?” he asked very gently.

  “I — should have told you. I was afraid.”

  He said: “I’m terribly sorry. It must have been perfect torture for you to undress — to come into the studio. If you’d only given me an idea of how matters stood I could have made it a little easier. I’m afraid I was brusque — taking it for granted that you were a model and knew your business…. I’m terribly sorry.”

  She lifted her head, looked at him, with the tears still clinging to her lashes.

  “You have been very nice to me. It is all my own fault.”

  He smiled. “Then it’s all right, now that we understand. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You make a stunning model,” he said frankly.

  “Do I? Then you will let me come again?”

  “Let you!” He laughed; “I’ll be more likely to beg you.”

  “Oh, you won’t have to,” she said; “I’ll come as long as you want me.”

  “That is simply angelic of you. Tell me, do you wish to descend to terra firma?”

  She glanced below, doubtfully:

  “N-no, thank you. If I could only stretch my — legs—”

  “Stretch away,” he said, much amused, “but don’t tumble off and break into pieces. I like you better as you are than as an antique and limbless Venus.”

  She cautiously and daintily extended first one leg then the other under the wool robe, then eased the cramped muscles of her back, straightening her body and flexing her arms with a little sigh of relief. As her shy sidelong gaze reverted to him she saw to her relief that he was not noticing her. A slight sense of warmth, suffused her body, and she stretched herself again, more confidently, and ventured to glance around.

  “Speaking of terms,” he said in an absent way, apparently preoccupied with the palette which he was carefully scraping, “do you happen to know what is the usual recompense for a model’s service?”

  She said that she had heard, and added with quick diffidence that she could not expect so much, being only a beginner.

  He polished the surface of the palette with a handful of cheese cloth:

  “Don’t you think that you are worth it?”

  “How can I be until I know how to pose for you?”

  “You will never have to learn how to pose, Miss West.”

  “I don’t know exactly what you mean.”

  “I mean that some models never learn. Some know how already — you, for example.”

  She flushed slightly: “Do you really mean that?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say so if I didn’t. It’s merely necessary for you to accustom yourself to holding a pose; the rest you already know instinctively.”

  “What is the rest?” she ventured to ask. “I don’t quite understand what you see in me—”

  “Well,” he said placidly, “you are beautifully made. That is nine-tenths of the matter. Your head is set logically on your neck, and your neck is correctly placed on your spine, and your legs and arms are properly attached to your torso — your entire body, anatomically speaking, is hinged, hung, supported, developed as the ideal body should be. It’s undeformed, unmarred, unspoiled, and that’s partly luck, partly inheritance, and mostly decent habits and digestion.”

  She was listening intently, interested, surprised, her pink lips slightly parted.

  “Another point,” he continued; “you seem unable to move or rest ungracefully. Few women are so built that an ungraceful motion is impossible for them. You are one of the few. It’s all a matter of anatomy.”

  She remained silent, watching him curiously.

  He said: “But the final clincher to your qualifications is that you are intelligent. I have known pretty women,” he added with, sarcasm, “who were not what learned men would call precisely intelligent. But you are. I showed you my sketch, indicated in a general way what I wanted, and instinctively and intelligently you assumed the proper attitude. I didn’t have to take you by the chin and twist your head as though you were a lay figure; I didn’t have to pull you about and flex and bend and twist you. You knew that I wanted you to look like some sort of an ethereal immortality, deliciously relaxed, adrift in sunset clouds. And you were it — somehow or other.”

  She looked down, thoughtfully, nestling to the chin in the white wool folds. A smile, almost imperceptible, curved her lips.

  “You are making it very easy for me,” she said.

  “You make it easy for yourself.”

  “I was horribly afraid,” she said thoughtfully.

  “I have no doubt of it.”

  “Oh, you don’t know — nobody can know — no man can understand the terror of — of the first time—”

  “It must be a ghastly experience.”

  “It is! — I don’t mean that you have not done everything to make it easier — but — there in the little room — my courage left me — I almost died. I’d have run away only — I was afraid you wouldn’t let me—”

  He began to laugh; she tried to, but the terror of it all was as yet too recent.

  “At first,” she said, “I was afraid I wouldn’t do for a model — not exactly afraid of my — my appearance, but because I was a novice; and I imagined that one had to know exactly how to pose—”

  “I think,” he interrupted smilingly, “that you might take the pose again if you are rested. Go on talking; I don’t mind it.”

  She sat erect, loosened the white wool robe and dropped it from her with less consciousness and effort than before. Very carefully she set her feet on the blocks, fitting the shapely heels to the chalked outlines; found the mark for her elbow, adjusted her slim, smooth body and looked at him, flushing.

  “All right,” he said briefly; “go ahead and talk to me.”

  “Do you wish me to?”

  “Yes; I’d rather.”

  “I don’t know exactly what to say.”

  “Say anything,” he returned absently, selecting a flat brush with a very long handle.

  She thought a moment, then, lifting her eyes:

  “I might ask you your name.”

  “What? Don’t you know it? Oh, Lord! Oh, Vanity! I thought you’d heard of me.”

  She blushed, confused by her ignorance and what she feared was annoyance on his part; then perceived that he was merely amused; and her face cleared.

  “We folk who create concrete amusement for the public always imagine ourselves much better known to that public than we are, Miss West. It’s our little vanity — rather harmless after all. We’re a pretty decent lot, sometimes absurd, especially in our tragic moments; sometimes emotional, usually illogical, often impulsive, frequently tender-hearted as well as supersensitive.

  “Now it was a pleasant little vanity for me to take it for granted that somehow you had heard of me and had climbed twelve flights of stairs for the privilege of sitting for me.”

  He laughed so frankly that the shy, responsive smile made her face enchanting; and he coolly took advantage of it, and while exciting and stimulating it, affixed it immortally on the exquisite creature he was painting.

  “So you didn’t climb those twelve flights solely for the privilege of having me paint you?”

  “No,” she admitted, laughingly, “I was merely going to begin at the top and apply for work all the way down until somebody took me — or nobody took me.”

  “But why begin at the top?”

  “It is easier to bear disappointment going down,” she said, seriously; “if two or three artists had refused me on the first and second floors, my legs would not have carried me up very far.”

  “Bad logic,” he commented. “We mount by experience, using our wrecked hopes as footholds.”

  “You don’t know how much a girl can endure. There comes a time-after years of steady descent — when misfortune and disappointment become endurable; when hope deferred no longer sickens. It is in rising toward better things that disappointments hurt most cruelly.”

  He turned his head in surprise; then went on painting:

  “Your philosophy is the philosophy of submission.”

  “Do you call a struggle of years, submission?”

  “But it was giving up after all — acquiescence, despondency, a laissez faire policy.”

  “One may tire of fighting.”

  “One may. Another may not.”

  “I think you have never had to fight very hard.”

  He turned his head abruptly; after a moment’s silent survey of her, he resumed his painting with a sharp, impersonal glance before every swift and decisive brush stroke:

  “No; I have never had to fight, Miss West…. It was keen of you to recognise it. I have never had to fight at all. Things come easily to me — things have a habit of coming my way…. I suppose I’m not exactly the man to lecture anybody on the art of fighting fortune. She’s always been decent to me…. Sometimes I’m afraid — I have an instinct that she’s too friendly…. And it troubles me. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked up at her: “Are you sure?”

  “I think so. I have been watching you painting. I never imagined anybody could draw so swiftly, so easily — paint so surely, so accurately — that every brush stroke could be so — so significant, so decisive…. Is it not unusual? And is not that what is called facility?”

  “Lord in Heaven!” he said; “what kind of a girl am I dealing with? — or what kind of a girl is dealing so unmercifully with me?”

  “I — I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, you did. Those very lovely and wonderfully shaped eyes of yours are not entirely for ornament. Inside that pretty head there’s an apparatus designed for thinking; and it isn’t idle.”

  He laughed gaily, a trifle defiantly:

  “You’ve said it. You’ve found the fly in the amber. I’m cursed with facility. Worse still it gives me keenest pleasure to employ it. It does scare me occasionally — has for years — makes me miserable at intervals — fills me full of all kinds of fears and doubts.”

  He turned toward her, standing on his ladder, the big palette curving up over his left shoulder, a wet brush extended in his right hand:

  “What shall I do!” he exclaimed so earnestly that she sat up straight, startled, forgetting her pose. “Ought I to stifle the vigour, the energy, the restless desire that drives me to express myself — that will not tolerate the inertia of calculation and ponderous reflection? Ought I to check myself, consider, worry, entangle myself in psychologies, seek for subtleties where none exist — split hairs, relapse into introspective philosophy when my fingers itch for a lump of charcoal and every colour on my set palette yells at me to be about my business?”

  He passed the flat tip of his wet brush through the mass of rags in his left hand with a graceful motion like one unsheathing a sword:

  “I tell you I do the things which I do, as easily, as naturally, as happily as any fool of a dicky-bird does his infernal twittering on an April morning. God knows whether there’s anything in my work or in his twitter; but neither he nor I are likely to improve our output by pondering and cogitation…. Please resume the pose.”

  She did so, her dark young eyes on him; and he continued painting and talking in his clear, rapid, decisive manner:

  “My name is Louis Neville. They call me Kelly — my friends do,” he added, laughing. “Have you ever seen any of my work?”

  “Yes.”

  He laughed again: “That’s more soothing. However, I suppose you saw that big canvas of mine for the ceiling of the Metropolitan Museum’s new northwest wing. The entire town saw it.”

  “Yes, I saw it.”

  “Did you care for it?”

  She had cared for it too intensely to give him any adequate answer. Never before had her sense of colour and form and beauty been so exquisitely satisfied by the painted magic of any living painter. So this was the man who had enveloped her, swayed her senses, whirled her upward into his ocean of limpid light! This was the man who had done that miracle before which, all day long, crowds of the sober, decent, unimaginative — the solid, essentials of the nation — had lingered fascinated! This was the man — across there on a stepladder. And he was evidently not yet thirty; and his name was Neville and his friends called him Kelly.

  “Yes,” she said, diffidently, “I cared for it.”

  “Really?”

  He caught her eye, laughed, and went on with his work.

  “The critics were savage,” he said. “Lord! It hurts, too. But I’ve simply got to be busy. What good would it do me to sit down and draw casts with a thin, needle-pointed stick of hard charcoal. Not that they say I can’t draw. They admit that I can. They admit that I can paint, too.”

  He laughed, stretched his arms:

  “Draw! A blank canvas sets me mad. When I look at one I feel like covering it with a thousand figures twisted into every intricacy and difficulty of foreshortening! I wish I were like that Hindu god with a dozen arms; and even then I couldn’t paint fast enough to satisfy what my eyes and brain have already evoked upon an untouched canvas…. It’s a sort of intoxication that gets hold of me; I’m perfectly cool, too, which seems a paradox but isn’t. And all the while, inside me, is a constant, hushed kind of laughter, bubbling, which accompanies every brush stroke with an ‘I told you so!’ — if you know what I’m trying to say — do you?”

  “N-not exactly. But I suppose you mean that you are self-confident.”

  “Lord! Listen to this girl say in a dozen words what I’m trying to say in a volume so that it won’t scare me! Yes! That’s it. I am confident. And it’s that self-confidence which sometimes scares me half to death.”

  From his ladder he pointed with his brush to the preliminary sketch that faced her, touching figure after figure:

  “I’m going to draw them in, now,” he said; “first this one. Can you catch the pose? It’s going to be hard; I’ll block up your heels, later; that’s it! Stand up straight, stretch as though the next moment you were going to rise on tiptoe and float upward without an effort—”

  He was working like lightning in long, beautiful, clean outline strokes, brushed here and there with shadow shapes and masses. And time flew at first, then went slowly, more slowly, until it dragged at her delicate body and set every nerve aching.

  “I — may I rest a moment?”

  “Sure thing!” he said, cordially, laying aside palette and brushes.

  “Come on, Miss West, and we’ll have luncheon.”

  She hastily swathed herself in the wool robe.

  “Do you mean — here?”

  “Yes. There’s a dumb-waiter. I’ll ring for the card.”

  “I’d like to,” she said, “but do you think I had better?”

  “Why not?”

  “You mean — take lunch with you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Is it customary?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Then I think I will go out to lunch somewhere—”

  “I’m not going to let you get away,” he said, laughing. “You’re too good to be real; I’m worried half to death for fear that you’ll vanish in a golden cloud, or something equally futile and inconsiderate. No, I want you to stay. You don’t mind, do you?”

  He was aiding her to descend from her eyrie, her little white hand balanced on his arm. When she set foot on the floor she looked up at him gravely:

  “You wouldn’t let me do anything that I ought not to, would you, Mr.

  Kelly — I mean Mr. Neville?” she added in confusion.

  “No. Anyway I don’t know what you ought or ought not to do. Luncheon is a simple matter of routine. It’s sole significance is two empty stomachs. I suppose if you go out you will come back, but — I’d rather you’d remain.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” he admitted with a laugh, “it’s probably because I like to hear myself talk to you. Besides, I’ve always the hope that you’ll suddenly become conversational, and that’s a possibility exciting enough to give anybody an appetite.”

  “But I have conversed with you,” she said.

  “Only a little. What you said acted like a cocktail to inspire me for a desire for more.”

  “I am afraid that you were not named Kelly in vain.”

  “You mean blarney? No, it’s merely frankness. Let me get you some bath-slippers—”

  “Oh — but if I am to lunch here — I can’t do it this way!” she exclaimed in flushed consternation.

  “Indeed you must learn to do that without embarrassment, Miss West. Tie up your robe at the throat, tuck up your sleeves, slip your feet into a nice pair of brand-new bath-slippers, and I’ll ring for luncheon.”

  “I — don’t — want to—” she began; but he went away into the hall, rang, and presently she heard the ascending clatter of a dumb-waiter. From it he took the luncheon card and returned to where she was sitting at a rococo table. She blushed as he laid the card before her, and would have nothing to do with it. The result was that he did the ordering, sent the dumb-waiter down with his scribbled memorandum, and came wandering back with long, cool glances at his canvas and the work he had done on it.

  “I mean to make a stunning thing of it,” he remarked, eying the huge chassis critically. “All this — deviltry — whatever it is inside of me — must come out somehow. And that canvas is the place for it.” He laughed and sat down opposite her:

  “Man is born to folly, Miss West — born full of it. I get rid of mine on canvas. It’s a safer outlet for original sin than some other ways.”

 

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