We prefer our pessimists young and tender, like asparagus; ten years older and what a bore even Hamlet might have been!—"The Silver Poppy."
Repellier had been prevailed upon to attempt a portrait of Mrs. Alfred Spaulding, and three times a week he came to her house to drink a cup of tea and to work, relaxingly, it is true, on a canvas which was progressing neither fast nor altogether favorably. He had undertaken the task only under gentle protest, for, since that day of mingled alarm and disgust when he beheld two pages of an illustrated weekly given over to what its editor had dared to call The Repellier Girl, the old artist had gone back to his genre work, declaring that he was tired of the American gigantic miniature. So, profitable as he might have found the painting of beautiful gowns and faces in Bishop's whole lengths, he preferred thereafter to regard all labor like that which he was now performing for Mrs. Spaulding as the avocation of a busy life, and not the vocation of an idle one. And in this instance, too, his fair sitter had confided to him that she would like the portrait to be done in secret. It was to be a Christmas present for her husband, and, as she added with an ambiguity that somewhat ruffled the usual equanimity of Repellier, "Alfred is such a jealous-minded creature, besides."
It was Cordelia who had finally persuaded him to undertake the picture, laughing all seriousness out of its rigid secrecy and holding it up to him as merely the passing whim of a very wealthy and very idle woman. It was she, too, who suggested a plan which he ultimately carried out—that the check he received in payment for his work be handed over to the chronically depleted funds of that East Side Convalescent Home of which he was a trustee.
Mrs. Spaulding, in turn, was not ungrateful for what she considered Cordelia's good offices in this case. She even confessed to her young ward the timid fear that a great artist like Repellier, reproducing on his canvas feature by feature the very face in which a vast but heroically hidden passion burned, might some day read the soul of the picture, where the soul of the woman had passed unnoticed. Cordelia agreed that such cases were not unknown, but honorably kept her own counsel in the matter and even bravely fought down within herself the last inner voice of flippancy.
When Repellier called that afternoon he found Cordelia down in the Spauldings' commodious kitchen, a cook and two busy maids about her.
"I had to call you down, it smells so fine," she cried happily, thrusting before his astonished nose a pan of sizzling English pheasant, which, after a long and tiring hunt throughout the city, she confided to him, she had found somewhere in cold storage.
"How domestic we are, and how charming we look!" said Repellier in reply, noting her bright eyes and flushed face.
"Yes, isn't it fine?"
"But," he asked, "what does it all mean?"