She wondered where she was going. There was a ferry far up on the Riverside Drive which would take her across to New Jersey, and thence, by a combination of trolley-cars, she could work her way southward to Pemberton Heights. This would consume an hour and more, and so eat up part of the afternoon. What she would do when she arrived home with her dreams all shattered God alone knew. If she could only have seen her friend, Mrs. Collingham, clinging to that kind hand as she poured out her heart....
Just then a huge building came into sight on the left, and with it a new impulse. She had often meant to visit it, though the day never seemed to come. Gussie had once gone to the Metropolitan Museum in company with Sadie Inglis, since when she had been in the habit of saying that she had as good as taken a trip abroad. Jennie didn't want a trip abroad; she wanted soothing, comforting, affection. She wanted another drop of that experienced, womanly sympathy, instinct with kindliness and knowledge of the world which she had tasted for the first and only time on that blissful afternoon at Collingham Lodge.
JENNIE, YOU HAVEN'T GOT A HUNDRED DOLLARS! TELL ME YOU HAVEN'T!
It was to get nearer to Collingham Lodge that she left the bus to drag herself up the long flight of steps and into the vast, cool hall. There were others going in, chiefly the Slavs and Italians for whom she felt a legitimate Anglo-Saxon contempt, so that she had nothing to do but to follow them. Thus she found herself at the top of another long flight of steps, gazing about her in an awe that soon became an intoxicating sense of beauty.
It was Jennie's first approach to beauty on this scale of immensity and variety. It was her first draught of Art. Her childhood's poring over Ancient Rome Restored had given her a feeling for line and economy, but she had never dreamed that color, substance, and texture could be used with this daring, profuse creativeness. Having no ability to seize details, she drifted helplessly up and down aisles of splendor and gleam. Here there were gold and silver, here was tapestry, here crystal, here enamel. The pictures were endless, endless. She could no more deal with them than with a sunset. Life came to the Scarborough tradition in her as it does to a frozen limb, with distress and yet with an element of ecstasy. A soul that had passed to a higher plane of existence, whom there was no one to welcome and guide, might have ventured timidly into the celestial land as Jennie among these lovely things outside her comprehension.
She came to herself, as it were, on hearing a man's voice say, in a kind of tone and idiom with which she was familiar:
"Have you looked at this Cellini now? That's the only authentic bit of Cellini in the United States. There's six or seven other pieces in different museums that people says is Cellini, but there's always a hitch in the proof."
Turning, she saw a stocky man in custodian's uniform who was addressing a group of Italians, two bareheaded women, three children between ten and fifteen, and a man. All were interested. All studied the gold shell with its dragon-shaped handle in purplish enamel. They commented, criticized, appraised, even the children pointing out excellencies to one another. When they had drifted away, Jennie turned to the kindly Irishman, who, by dint of living with beauty, had grasped its spirit, and put a hesitating question. She asked him to repeat the name of the gold-smith, pronouncing it after him till she registered it on her mind as she had that of Lady Hamilton.
"Sure, there was an artist for you," the custodian went on. "The breed is dead and gone. Hot-timpered fellow, though. Had more mistresses and killed more men than you could count. Should read about him in a book he wrote himself." He looked at Jennie from the corner of an eye, accustomed to "size up" an individual here and there among the thousands who floated daily through his little domain, apparently finding in her something that merited further favors. "Are you wise to this Memling?" he asked, leading the way to a corner of the wall where hung a small portrait. "There's only two other men in the wor-rld that could have painted that head, and that's Holbein and Rembrandt. Memling himself never did it but just that wance."