“Good morning, Mam’selle Euanstead. You have slep’ well?”
“Gorgeously! Is this for me, Monsieur Marge?”
A single place at the kitchen table was set with a bowl of hot cocoa on a red checked napkin. There was another napkin, a big spoon, crisp hot bread fresh toasted in the oven, and a huge sweet orange.
“An egg also?” asked Monsieur Marge from the doorstep where he sat with his pipe. “No? Then when you have finished a second cup of cocoa I shall show you my hive’ and my bee’ and my studio.”
The latter proved to be a small, dingy, not too well-lighted building behind the rambling, whitewashed, red-roofed house. Here dusty canvases and dried tubes of paint, bits of old tapestry and ancient stretcher-frames were piled and presided over by two of those artist’s lay figures that resemble life-sized, wigless dolls.
Monsieur Marge turned over the quaint old pictures to display them and Cynthia murmured appreciation, trying hard to find something to admire in each. But they were of such an ancient manner, of the “brown gravy” school, with shadows dead as brown paint and thick, lifeless color, that proper applause was difficult.
“You know I paint in America too?” he asked her proudly.
“Yes, Mrs. Brewster told me. Where was that?”
“I live in Philadelphia fifteen years. That was before the war. Then I live in South America with my son, long time. Many Basque live in South America. Then I come home here, to my old farm I buy when I young man ... many year ago. That was before you were born.” He chuckled at his own age. “Long ago I paint those panorama for the World Fair in Chicago.”
“Goodness! Did you? I’ve heard of them but never saw one.”