“I dare say Constantine is right about them,” he said; “they are rather crazy things, and anyhow, I'm sick of them.”
Mary was quite relieved to have them hidden. The merman in particular had got upon her nerves of late.
As the winter advanced, the Byrds' circle of acquaintances grew, and many visitors dropped into the studio for tea. These showed much interest in Stefan's new picture, a large study of Mary in the guise of Demeter, for which she was posing seated, robed in her Berber gown. Miss Mason in particular was delighted with the painting, which she dubbed a “companion piece” to the Danaë. The story of Constantine's decision against the two salon canvases got about and, amusingly enough, heightened the Byrds' popularity. The Anglo-Saxon public is both to take its art neat, preferring it coated with a little sentiment. It now became accepted that Stefan's genius was due to his wife, whose love had lighted the torch of inspiration.
“Ah, Mr. Byrd,” Miss Mason had summed up the popular view, in one of her rare romantic moments, “the love of a good woman—!” Stefan had looked completely vague at this remark, and Mary had burst out laughing.
“Why, Sparrow,” for so, to Miss Mason's delight, she had named her, “don't be Tennysonian, as Stefan would say. It was Stefan's power to feel love, and not mine to call it out, that painted the Danaë,” and she looked at him with proud tenderness.
But the Sparrow was unconvinced. “You can't tell me. If 'twas all in him, why didn't some other girl over in Paris call it out long ago?”
“Lots tried,” grinned Stefan, with his cheeky-boy expression.
“Ain't he terrible,” Miss Mason sighed, smiling. She adored Mary's husband, but consistently disapproved of him.
Try as she would, Mary failed to shake her friends' estimate of her share in the family success. It became the fashion to regard her as a muse, and she, who had felt oppressed by Stefan's lover-like deification, now found her friends, too, conspiring to place her on a pedestal. Essentially simple and modest, she suffered real discomfort from the cult of adoration that surrounded her. Coming from a British community which she felt had underestimated her, she now found herself made too much of. A smaller woman would have grown vain amid so much admiration; Mary only became inwardly more humble, while outwardly carrying her honors with laughing deprecation.
For some time after the night of Constance's reception, Stefan had shown every evidence of contentment, but as the winter dragged into a cold and slushy March he began to have recurrent moods of his restless irritability. By this time Mary was moving heavily; she could no longer keep brisk pace with him in his tramps up the Avenue, but walked more slowly and for shorter distances. She no longer sprang swiftly from her chair or ran to fetch him a needed tool; her every movement was matronly. But she was so well, so entirely normal, as practically to be unconscious of a change to which her husband was increasingly alive.