The day was a fine one of sunlight less tempered with gray than most Paris sunshine. The model was a stout, red-haired woman with the milk-white skin of red-haired people. From the great expanse of the skylight, there poured upon her opulent nude body, as smooth and white as a newly peeled almond, a flood of light that was sparkling, in spite of the north exposure. The room rang with the high, clear brightness of that white flesh in that morning light.
Around the model sat the thirty or so disciples of the Master. While I waited for Angelica, I wandered around back of them, glancing at the canvases on their easels.
They had all painted the model the color of an old saddle. From one dim, cavernous sketch after another, a misty, smeary, dark-brown mass looked out waveringly from blue, or brown, or gray twilight. The red head glimmered faintly, attenuated by layers and layers of shadow. The disciples looked up at the gleaming white woman before them, reflecting the daylight as definitely as a sound tooth reflects it, and looked down happily and proudly on their dark, blurred canvases. You could see how pleased they were at the progress they were making. They had caught it, this time, they had caught what was the thing to catch.
“We’ll have some fireworks, all right, when ‘the Master’ gets here,” I thought to myself.
Presently he came. The door swung open, I caught a glimpse of the concierge performing the impossible in the way of holding the door open and effacing herself in one and the same gesture, and in came a dapper, immaculately dressed little old gentleman, with gray gloves and pearl-gray gaiters.
The disciples prostrated themselves, foreheads to the floor (or at least that is the impression they made on me in the first intense emotion of his entrance) and then stiffened to attention before their easels, not to miss a word of the down-dropping pearls and rubies.
The little old gentleman advanced with small, gentlemanly steps to the first of the easels, and contemplated the leather-brown South-Sea-Islander depicted on it. Every one of the students held her breath. So did I.
He looked at it a long time, his face imperturbable. Then with the traditional studio gesture I had seen all my life in studios—outstretched thumb, modeling in the air—he began saying what I had heard all my life in studios, “A little more shadow on the shoulder, I should say. And perhaps.... Yes, go into the modeling of that arm more deeply. On the whole very promising, very interesting.”
He passed on to the next easel. One felt another devout heart turn over with a rustle. “Good! Well felt, that knee. But lacking in distinction, perhaps, the treatment of the hair. Go into the modeling of the hands more deeply.”
He passed to the next. And the next. And the next. I heard a murmur of “Very promising ... very interesting ... deeper feeling about ... keep it flat ... subtle ... relations of planes not quite ... very promising ... very interesting.”