2
“Felix strikes me as rather paintable. Could you spare him a few afternoons for a sitting now and then? I mean, some time this winter? I’m getting interested in doing portraits again.”
“I’d love to have you!”
Dorothy Sheridan had come back from her fishing village, and a little trip abroad to boot, and she and the Fays were dining in a little restaurant to which she had taken them—not very far from their studio, a little Italian place frequented by artists, where the food was good and the prices low. The men one saw there wore soft collars, like Felix’s own, sometimes turned up to flare about the chin, sometimes open at the neck; one of the girls at the tables wore a Russian smock, like Dorothy Sheridan, and all of them seemed, like her, comfortably uncorseted. They all seemed to know each other, and each new person who came greeted the whole roomful. It was a friendly place.
Felix was rather amused at having his afternoons asked for and given away without his being consulted. But he was flattered by the invitation. He had never been painted, and he considered it a distinction.
“It will be a bore,” Dorothy warned him. “You’ll get awfully tired of it before I’m through. But I’ll do you in half a dozen sittings, I promise you, or give it up. Give him a cup of coffee, before he comes. I don’t talk to my subjects, and they are likely to fall asleep!”
They had been to Dorothy Sheridan’s studio that afternoon, and looked at her paintings and sketches. The paintings were, with one or two exceptions, in a vivid, splashing style that Felix liked. “I’ve changed my style since going to Paris,” she said. “These things are what they call over there Post-Impressionist. I’ll do you in my best Cezanne-Matisse manner, Felix, with some variations all my own. You won’t know yourself!”
Rose-Ann had been most impressed by some of Dorothy’s old sketches, particularly a series of lovely nudes done in pencil with a hard, vibrant line. Dorothy picked one of them out and gave it to Rose-Ann. “Here’s one that looks like you,” she said, appraising Rose-Ann’s figure with a judicious eye. “You can use it for a book-plate if you like.”
It was like Rose-Ann, Felix thought, when she pinned it on the wall that night—it had the same firm and delicate contours, the same sweet livingness of a body that is made for movement, for action, for intense and poignant use. The figure in the drawing was poised in the hesitant instant before flight, with head turned to look backward, and the whole body ready at the next moment either to relapse again into reassured repose or to put all its force into some wild dash for freedom. And somehow that too reminded him of Rose-Ann—of Rose-Ann’s soul.
Rose-Ann was looking at the picture with eyes in which some purpose fulminated darkly.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
“That I shall never wear corsets again! It’s really absurd, isn’t it? To imprison one’s body in such a thing as that.... I’m going to burn mine up—now!” And presently, in her chemise and stockings, she solemnly knelt before the Franklin stove and laid the offending article upon the live coals.
“The last of my conventions!” she said, as if to herself.
And then, as it commenced to smoulder, and an acrid odour of burnt rubber emerged, she wrinkled her nostrils and put her thumb and finger to them. “It thmells bad!” she said. And reflectively: “I suppose conventions always do, at the end.... Well, it’s gone now, and my body is free.—Gone forever, leaving nothing but a ... faint unpleasant odour, shall I say?—behind.... Felix—would you mind if I cut off my hair?”
“Cut off—!”
“Short, you know. Like Dorothy Sheridan’s. I’ve always wanted to. And I never quite had the nerve. Living here, it seems only natural. You wouldn’t mind?”
She loosened her hair and it fell about her shoulders, like a flame. “I think it would curl if it were cut. It did when I was a little girl.”
“We’ve no scissors,” said Felix, practically—deferring in his own mind the question of whether he would like her hair cut short or not. He did not know. It would look well—there was no doubt at all of that. He had always wondered at the foolish vanity of women, in putting up with the inconvenience of long hair. He had felt that long hair was in some way a badge of woman’s dependence on man, a symbol of her failure to achieve freedom for herself. And yet ... when it came to Rose-Ann’s hair—
Rose-Ann read his face as a wife can. “No, I suppose not,” she said, and sighed. “No scissors! Well, there’s always something to prevent one from being rash. In the morning I shan’t want to—because I’m going out to look for a job....”
Felix smiled. “Wolf! wolf!” he mocked gently. He had heard that threat of a job too often to be alarmed about it now.
“You’ll see,” said Rose-Ann gaily.