Martha should have painted our presidents, our mayors, our politicians, our authors, our college presidents, and our critics. Posterity might have learned more from such portraits than from volumes of psychoanalytic biography. But most of her sitters were silly Chicago ladies, not particularly weak because they were not particularly strong. On the few occasions on which in her capacity as an artist she had faced character, her brushes unerringly depicted something beneath the surface. She tore away men's masks and, with a kind of mystic understanding, painted their insides. How it was done, I don't know. Probably she herself didn't know. Many an artist is ignorant of the secret of his own method. If I had ascribed this quality to Martha during her lifetime, which I never did, she might not have taken it as praise. It may not, indeed, have been her ambition, although truth was undoubtedly her ambition. Speculation aside, this was no art for Chicago. I doubt, indeed, if it would have been popular anywhere, for men the world over are alike in this, that they not only prefer to be painted in masks, they even want the artist to flatter the mask a bit.
The studio, I observed at once, was a little arty, a little more arty than a painter's studio usually is. It was arranged, of that there could be no doubt. There were, to be sure, canvases stacked against the wall in addition to those which were hanging, but they had been stacked with a crafty hand, one indubious of its effect. For the rest, the tables and couches were strewn with brocades and laces, and lilacs and mimosa bloomed in brown and blue and green earthenware bowls on the tables. Later, I knew that marigolds and zinnias would replace these and, later still, violets and gardenias. On an easel stood my unfinished portrait and a palette and a box of paints lay on a stool nearby.
Martha herself wore a soft, clinging, dark-green woolen dress, almost completely covered by a brown denim painter's blouse. Her hair was her great glory, long, reddish gold Mélisande hair which, when uncoiled, hung far below her knees, but today it was knotted loosely on top of her head. Her face, keen and searching, wore an expression that might be described as wistful; discontent lurked somewhere between her eyes and her mouth. Her complexion was sallow and she wore eye-glasses.
There was some one else present, a girl, sitting in a shadowy corner, who rose as I entered. A strong odour of Cœur de Jeannette hovered about her. She was an American. She was immediately introduced as Miss Clara Barnes of Chicago, but I would have known she was an American had she not been so introduced. She wore a shirt-waist and skirt. She had very black hair, parted in the middle, a face that it would have been impossible to remember ten minutes and which now, although I have seen her many times since, I have completely forgotten, and very thick ankles. I gathered presently that she was in Paris to study singing as were so many girls like her. Very soon, I sized her up as the kind of girl who thinks that antimacassars are ottomans, that tripe is a variety of fish, that Così Fan Tutte is an Italian ice cream, that the pope's nose is a nasal appendage which has been blessed by the head of the established church, that The Beast in the Jungle is an animal story, and that when one says Arthur Machen one means Harry Mencken.
Well, we'd best begin, said Martha. It's late.
Isn't it too late? I was rather surprised when you asked me to come in the afternoon.
Martha smiled but there was a touch of petulance in her reply: I knew you wouldn't get up very early the morning after your first night in Paris, and I knew if I didn't get you here today there would be small chance of getting you here at all. If you come again, of course it will be in the morning.
I climbed to the model-chair, seated myself, grasped the green book that was part of the composition, and automatically assumed that woebegone expression that is worn by all amateurs who pose for their portraits.
That won't do at all, said Martha. I asked Clara to come here to amuse you.
Clara tried. She told me that she was studying Manon and that she had been to the Opéra-Comique fifteen times to hear the opera.