“No, no,” she interrupted, lightly. “I don't need—”
“But my mother tried to insist on sending one over here every afternoon for me. I wouldn't let her, because I like the walk, but a girl—”
“A girl likes to walk, too,” said Mary. “Let me tell you where I've been this afternoon and how I happened to be near enough to make you take me home. I've been to see a little old man who makes pictures of the smoke. He has a sort of warehouse for a studio, and he lives there with his mother and his wife and their seven children, and he's gloriously happy. I'd seen one of his pictures at an exhibition, and I wanted to see more of them, so he showed them to me. He has almost everthing he ever painted; I don't suppose he's sold more than four or five pictures in his life. He gives drawing-lessons to keep alive.”
“How do you mean he paints the smoke?” Bibbs asked.
“Literally. He paints from his studio window and from the street—anywhere. He just paints what's around him—and it's beautiful.”
“The smoke?”
“Wonderful! He sees the sky through it, somehow. He does the ugly roofs of cheap houses through a haze of smoke, and he does smoky sunsets and smoky sunrises, and he has other things with the heavy, solid, slow columns of smoke going far out and growing more ethereal and mixing with the hazy light in the distance; and he has others with the broken sky-line of down-town, all misted with the smoke and puffs and jets of vapor that have colors like an orchard in mid-April. I'm going to take you there some Sunday afternoon, Bibbs.”
“You're showing me the town,” he said. “I didn't know what was in it at all.”
“There are workers in beauty here,” she told him, gently. “There are other painters more prosperous than my friend. There are all sorts of things.”
“I didn't know.”