‘Different men come to the same end by different roads,’ said Gaston. ‘Your greatest English authority on culture declares that any man with a dash of genius is the born elevator of others. I believe myself to have a dash—a thin streak, rather—of genius. I believe myself to be a born elevator, but it must be in my own way.’
‘And that is?’ asked Geoffrey.
‘Well, remembering the atmosphere of Barnwell and Chesterton, the scene of our early labours, one feels sure that the geraniums must have choked for want of air. Remembering the clay soil, the neighbourhood of that oozy river, the thick air, the black ugliness,’ Gaston shivered unaffectedly, ‘one is sceptical even as to draining-pipes. My opinion is—that the English must be regenerated by art, by sculpture notably, owing to the low price of plaster casts. Sculpture can be best studied in Italy, and I am on my road thither. But Geff and I may still be fellow-labourers in the same cause.’
Gaston rattled forth this specimen of ‘poker talk’ lightly, his sombrero pulled low on his forehead, his shrewd, thought-reading eyes making observation the while of Linda—Linda whom, in long-dead Paris days, he just liked too well to be ever, for one moment, in love with. And the result of his study was that, in her Leghorn hat and cambric gown and slim, eight-buttoned gloves, Linda Constantia Thorne looked undeniably picturesque.
Each attitude that she took had, he saw, been diligently learnt by heart. It was Mrs. Thorne’s habit when in town to spend her nights at the Lyceum, studying gracefulness, from the stalls, at so much an hour. Her expression savoured rather of earth than heaven. Her figure spoke of the Parisian deformity artist, not of nature. But these faults were just les défauts de ses qualités. Gaston could never think idiomatically save in French. A well-paying section of the art of 188- required models of Linda Thorne’s type. And what artist, with pockets poorly lined, can resist the prospect of a good unpaid model?
If pure-faced Madonnas commanded the worship yielded to them of old, no need to go farther than the exquisite brow and throat of his own Dinah. But pure-faced Madonnas in the nineteenth century are for the first-class sculptor. Gaston belonged to the dilettante third-rate men who execute pretty conventionalities with readiness, get money for them from the dealers, and are stirred neither by great expectation of success nor by great disappointment in failure.
In any case, so decided the quick brain under the sombrero, Linda Thorne, during half a summer here in Guernsey, must be a resource, personally, against stagnation. She had ripened into a kind of sub-acid cleverness that pleased Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot’s taste. Her acquaintance opened out a not unprofitable means of spending one’s hours between work and dinner. On principle, he was in favour always of the brain woman, as opposed to the sentiment woman. He chose the white rose rather than the red—his only condition being that the white rose must wear Jouvin’s gloves, get her dresses from Paris, abjure patchouli, and be peremptorily certain that every inch of his, Gaston’s, heart belonged to the somewhat neglected girl, with Juno face and Devonshire accent, who waited for him at home.
Before sixty seconds were over he had resolved upon soliciting Linda Thorne to be his model.
‘And while Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot chisels marble for the English pauper in some delicious Florentine palace, you are thinking of Guernsey as an abiding-place?’