“Her name?” I hesitated, even then desiring to protect the name of beauty, and to pardon the grotesque shabbiness of that girl’s act in taking me at my word. “Let’s see. Oh, it was a Miss Chittenden, as I remember it. Just a chit from Missouri.”
“Chittenden,” returned the Senator, with a puzzled air, “Chittenden?” Then a great light broke upon him. “Chittenden nothing! It’s Clarenden, that’s what it is. And if she told you anything else, she’s sailing under false pretences. Just like her, too!”
“No, indeed,” I interposed, warmly, “I’m sure she wouldn’t do that—there must be something she’d draw the line at. Come to think of it, Clarenden was the name she gave.”
“A long young dame,” pursued Bullwinkle, “blue eyes, you know, and a way with her? Mariellen Clarenden?”
I nodded. The Senator leaped in triumph. He turned upon me with the friendliest smile in the world. “What were you charging her?”
“Four hundred dollars. And I don’t sell it for a cent less to anybody.”
“Give you five hundred! Done!” The Senator snatched a checkbook and a fountain pen from the region of that waistcoat button we had lately wrangled over. I had no idea his motions could be so swift and so majestic. Perhaps I might have stayed his hand, in some effete idea of ethics, or professional etiquette; but Gigi’s inexorable eye was on me, dangling Mario before my hesitating soul. I compromised by taking the check, with vague thankfulness, and laying it on the table. I told myself I would think it over. It might be that five hundred dollars was not too much for a master-work, preferred above all Westminster Abbey.
“You wonder at me,” the Senator went on, with a guffaw that was like a sob. “Well, then, sit up and wonder all you like. Sometimes I wonder at myself. This hand—” he stroked the marble with the same sort of reverence the girl had shown about that plaster cast. “Oh, hang it, boy, we’re all human, even if you are studio-bred-and-broke, God help you, and I’m from Missouri! Listen, kid. I had a sister, a twin sister. A smart Aleck like you would probably say it sounds like opera-buff, or a dime novel, but it’s just plain fact, right out of my own life. And I was fonder of that girl than of any other human being that ever lived. This necktie you’ve been fussing over because it’s too tight and hard, you said;—well, it’s black, for her. And black is tight and hard, sometimes. Ah, well!” The Senator resolutely put away sadness, and again stretched out his own fine capable hand.
“My sister had the prettiest little hand in the county. County! Her hand was known all over the State, and many a young newspaper feller touched it—on paper—in the old days. Foot, too!” He meditated a moment on his own very good-looking shoes. “After she married Clarenden, the big railroad man, we saw less of each other, of course, but we were chums to the last. And the instant my eye lit on this lovely work, this masterpiece, though I say it that shouldn’t, I knew there was something in it for me! I didn’t quite know what, of course, until I found out that Mariellen was mixed up in it, and then ’twas clear as day. Had you copy a plaster cast, didn’t she?” He chuckled with pleasure in his perspicacity. “We Senators know all about plaster casts and death-masks and that sort of thing. Unless we want to miss a trick, we have ’em done to us, as soon as the time comes. But what I don’t understand is why Mariellen got cold feet! She’s a girl of some sense, I tell you, or was, until she got a hankering for New York, and what she calls the higher things in art!”