“I don’t know,” she answered, as she sat down in obedience to the other’s persuasive gesture. “I shall have to think a minute. You see this has been—well, rather—sudden.”
“I know, I know.” The girl looked as if she did. “May I give you a cup of tea? You must be chilled.”
“No, thank you. I am quite comfortable.”
“Not even a cigarette? Oh, I wonder what you Victorian women did for a solace when you weren’t allowed even a cigarette!”
You Victorian women! In spite of her tragic mood, a smile hovered on Margaret’s lips. So that was how this girl classified her. Yet Rose Morrison had fallen in love with a Victorian man.
“Then I may?” said the younger woman with her full-throated laugh. From her bright red hair, which was brushed straight back from her forehead, to her splendid figure, where her hips swung free like a boy’s, she was a picture of barbaric beauty. There was a glittering hardness about her, as if she had been washed in some indestructible glaze; but it was the glaze of youth, not of experience. She reminded Margaret of a gilded statue she had seen once in a museum; and the girl’s eyes, like the eyes of the statue, were gleaming, remote and impassive—eyes that had never looked on reality. The dress she wore was made of some strange “art cloth,” dyed in brilliant hues, fashioned like a kimono, and girdled at the hips with what Margaret mistook for a queer piece of rope. Nothing, not even her crude and confident youth, revealed Rose Morrison to her visitor so completely as this end of rope.
“You are an artist?” she asked, for she was sure of her ground. Only an artist, she decided, could be at once so arrogant with destiny and so ignorant of life.
“How did you know? Has George spoken of me?”
Margaret shook her head. “Oh, I knew without any one’s telling me.”
“I have a studio in Greenwich Village, but George and I met last summer at Ogunquit. I go there every summer to paint.”