The bare, ramshackle studio on Washington Square shocked her,—it was so comfortless, so dingy; but the canvases on the walls, set up against the wainscoting, stacked on every available chair, gave her a new and almost appalling impression of his personality, and the peculiar poignant power of him. She could not appraise them, or get any real sense of their quality apart from the astounding revelation of the man behind the work.
“They’re wonderful!” she gasped, but “You’re wonderful” were the words she stifled on her lips.
He painted till the light failed him.
“It’s this diffused glow,—this gentle, faded afternoon light that I want,” he said. “I want 163 you to emerge from your background as if you had bloomed out of it that very moment. Oh! I’ve got you at your hour, you know! The prescient maternal—that’s what I want. The conscious moment when a woman becomes aware that she is potentially a mother. Sheila’s done that for you. She’s brought it out in you. It was ready, it was waiting there before, but now it’s come. It’s wonderful!”
“Yes,” Nancy said, “it’s—it’s come.”
“It hasn’t been done, you know. It’s a modern conception, of course; but they all do the thing realized, or incipient. I want to do it implicit—that’s what I want. I might have searched the whole world over and not found it.”
“Well, here I am,” said Nancy faintly.
“Yes, here you are,” Collier Pratt responded out of the fervor of his artist’s absorption.
“It’s rather a personal matter to me,” Nancy ventured some seconds later.
Collier Pratt turned from the canvas he was contemplating, and looked at her, still posed as he had placed her, upright, yet relaxed in the scooped chair that held her without constraining her.