“I heard,” he said, “that there were three little female artists up here, and I came in to look them over, to see if they were pretty and interesting, or not. I live downstairs, my children, and my name is Lawrence Iverson.”
“I’ve seen some of your work,” said Enid, carelessly. “In the Kremoth Galleries. Rather good.”
He looked critically at Enid, but she met his glance with one quite as cool and appraising.
“Who are you?” he asked. “To call my work ‘rather good’?”
“No one much, just yet,” she answered.
He crossed the room and fixing his monocle, examined her work.
“Not even ‘rather good,’” he said. “Clever—cheaply clever. Trick stuff—all in one dimension. Worthless.”
“No, it isn’t,” she contradicted. “It’s what I mean it to be, anyway. It expresses what I want it to. Now, a thing like that ‘Idols’ you did is what I call a failure. You had something you wanted to express, and you didn’t. It didn’t mean anything.”
“My God! Young woman, I never mean anything.... But you’re the perfect school marm ‘doing art.’ You’re concerned with ideas, because you have a brain, a little tiny one, but no soul. You don’t know what beauty is. What, you girl, does a tree mean? What does a lovely arm mean? I give my pictures names because people won’t buy them without names. But the names are all damn nonsense, just to make the fools talk. For instance, I will conceive a group, of perfect, heart-breaking harmony, three figures in attitudes which form a complete and exquisite design.... You see that sort of thing once in a while, without forethought. I saw, the other day, a woman bending down from the top of a flight of steps to take a bag a grocer’s boy was reaching up to her. They made the most beautiful combination of curves God ever allowed.... You’re not bad looking....”
Enid paid no attention to this compliment. She frowned.