Rosaleen, too, was different; she wore an embroidered smock of dark red silk and she had bronze slippers and stockings, and her fine brown hair was parted on one side and doubled under, to look like a short crop. Landry thought she looked quite as an artist’s wife ought to look, and charming, and adorable. She had scarcely said a word all the evening; she had sat in silence while the two men talked, but he knew very well that she wasn’t listening. She had an odd, preoccupied look in her eyes which he later came to know very well....
It was a mild and somewhat flavourless evening. When the time came for him to go, the husband invited him to come to lunch the following Saturday, and he had said that he would.
He went home in a queer mood; he was, although he didn’t know it, refusing to think at all, refusing to examine his impressions.
III
As he was walking over from the bus that next Saturday, he met her hurrying through Fourth Street, and he was really shocked at her appearance. Even an artist’s wife ought to be a little more particular. She was hatless, with felt bedroom slippers on her feet, and her arms were filled with huge bundles from which protruded the feathery tops of carrots and celery leaves. The gay April breeze was blowing her soft untidy hair across her eyes, and at first she didn’t recognise him.
“Oh, Mr. Landry!” she said. “Don’t look at me!... You shouldn’t come so early...!”
There was a very great change in her; a greater one than he had realised before. She was not only thinner and paler and older looking; she was different. That critical and childish look in her eyes had gone, that air of an observer; she was no longer looking on at life, she was in it, she was living.
He took one of the immense bags and followed her upstairs.
And the studio, too, was revealed to him in its reality; the artistic glamour of it was gone in the daylight. In fact, it wasn’t a studio at all; there was, crowded into one corner, a small table on which Rosaleen’s drawing materials were neatly laid out on a blotter, but the other corners contained only sordid and common adjuncts to a poverty-stricken life; a cheap little bureau covered with a paltry lace scarf, a trunk masquerading as a table, a wooden egg crate in which were dozens of tins of tomatoes, bought at a sale. The distinguished artist himself was not what he had seemed; he was still handsome, still debonair, but he was wearing a dirty collar and a soiled white apron over a wrinkled suit. He was sitting beside a little gas stove on a table, on which was superimposed a portable oven with a glass door, and he was peering in with his extinguished eyes, so absorbed in his watching that he had to make a visible effort to arouse himself and to welcome Landry.
“A la bonne heure!” he said, cordially. “I’ve made something which no man with a soul could resist. It will be ready at one sharp. A Galette, to be eaten hot, with a sauce of wine and cream. That, coffee of the best, and a marvellous little salad.... Eh?”