“Now, dear! If they couldn’t understand, so much the worse for them. If they thought it meant sacrifice to me, they were mistaken. I have been happy in this little flat; only—” she leaned back and inclined her head with her eyes asquint—“only the paper in this room is atrocious; it’s a typical landlord’s selection—McGaw picked it out. You see what it means to be merely rich.”
She was so pretty thus that he kissed her, and then she went on:
“And so, dear, if I didn’t seem to be as impressed and delighted as you hoped to find me, it is because I was thinking of Mr. Hardy and the poor, dear, common little Post, and then—of Mr. Clayton. Did you think of him?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to—to cartoon him?”
“I suppose so.”
The fact he had not allowed himself to face was close to both of them, and the subject was dropped until, just as he was going down-town—this time to break the news to Hardy—he went into the room he sarcastically said he might begin to call his studio, now that he was getting ten thousand a year, to look for a sketch he had promised Nolan for the sporting page. And there on his drawing-board was an unfinished cartoon, a drawing of the strong face of John Clayton. He had begun it a few days before to use on the occasion of Clayton’s renomination. It had been a labor of love, and Kittrell suddenly realized how good it was. He had put into it all of his belief in Clayton, all of his devotion to the cause for which Clayton toiled and sacrificed, and in the simple lines he experienced the artist’s ineffable felicity; he had shown how good, how noble, how true a man Clayton was. All at once he realized the sensation the cartoon would produce, how it would delight and hearten Clayton’s followers, how it would please Hardy, and how it would touch Clayton. It would be a tribute to the man and the friendship, but now a tribute broken, unfinished. Kittrell gazed a moment longer, and in that moment Edith came.
“The dear, beautiful soul!” she exclaimed softly. “Neil, it is wonderful. It is not a cartoon; it is a portrait. It shows what you might do with a brush.”
Kittrell could not speak, and he turned the drawing-board to the wall.
When he had gone, Edith sat and thought—of Neil, of the new position, of Clayton. He had loved Neil, and been so proud of his work; he had shown a frank, naïve pleasure in the cartoons Neil had made of him. That last time he was there, thought Edith, he had said that without Neil the “good old cause,” as he called it, using Whitman’s phrase, could never have triumphed in that town. And now, would he come again? Would he ever stand in that room and, with his big, hearty laugh, clasp an arm around Neil’s shoulder, or speak of her in his good, friendly way as “the little woman?” Would he come now, in the terrible days of the approaching campaign, for rest and sympathy—come as he used to come in other campaigns, worn and weary from all the brutal opposition, the vilification and abuse and mud-slinging? She closed her eyes. She could not think that far.