He paused with his hands in his pockets before an unfinished picture on the easel; then, as his habit was, he began to stroll touristlike from canvas to canvas, standing before each in a musing ecstasy of contemplation that no readjustment of view ever seemed to disturb. Her eye instinctively joined his in its inspection; it was the one point where their natures merged. Thank God, there, was no doubt about the pictures! She was what she had always dreamed of being—the wife of a great artist. Keniston dropped into an armchair and filled his pipe. “How should you like to go to Europe?” he asked.
His wife looked up quickly. “When?”
“Now—this spring, I mean.” He paused to light the pipe. “I should like to be over there while these things are being exhibited.”
Claudia was silent.
“Well?” he repeated after a moment.
“How can we afford it?” she asked.
Keniston had always scrupulously fulfilled his duty to the mother and sister whom his marriage had dislodged; and Claudia, who had the atoning temperament which seeks to pay for every happiness by making it a source of fresh obligations, had from the outset accepted his ties with an exaggerated devotion. Any disregard of such a claim would have vulgarized her most delicate pleasures; and her husband’s sensitiveness to it in great measure extenuated the artistic obtuseness that often seemed to her like a failure of the moral sense. His loyalty to the dull women who depended on him was, after all, compounded of finer tissues than any mere sensibility to ideal demands.
“Oh, I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” he rejoined. “I think we might manage it.”
“At Mrs. Davant’s expense?” leaped from Claudia. She could not tell why she had said it; some inner barrier seemed to have given way under a confused pressure of emotions.
He looked up at her with frank surprise. “Well, she has been very jolly about it—why not? She has a tremendous feeling for art—the keenest I ever knew in a woman.” Claudia imperceptibly smiled. “She wants me to let her pay in advance for the four panels she has ordered for the Memorial Library. That would give us plenty of money for the trip, and my having the panels to do is another reason for my wanting to go abroad just now.”