Suddenly ... fear began to grow in her again, and an icy wind blew up her spine. What if ... he hadn't been quite the naïve, awkward, appealing youth that he had seemed? A few of the drawings....
Morbid? Well, yes ... distinctly on the morbid or suggestively erotic side, with the female forms—creatures of light and air—assuming strange postures as they dwindled and faded into blue distances as if borne on invisible winds. There was nothing repulsive about the figures, they were beautiful with no hint of ugliness or the deliberately perverse about them. But there was a suggestion of amorous abandonment and a strange, smouldering kind of half-virginal, half-wanton sensuality in their attitudes. It was as if the mind which had depicted them could have gone much further in giving them an illicit, orgiastic aspect and had been strongly tempted to do so. What if, in other drawings which had perhaps been shown to no one, all restraint had been thrust aside, and scenes portrayed that would have brought a quick flush to her cheeks—forced her to avert her eyes. She was no prude, but when the erotic aspects of a drawing verged on the pathological, when a completely pagan glorification of sex orgies and unrestraint was accepted as a matter of course it never failed to embarrass her and give her a slight feeling of uneasiness which she was powerless to overcome. Revulsion even, when the candor was too great, and her Puritan heritage too violently assailed.
All her life she had been in revolt against the hypocritical and straight-laced and her Puritan heritage was two generations removed. But there were limits—
It did no good at all for her to tell herself that she was being very foolish and unjust. An impetuous young painter today, determined to be completely true to his inner vision, had every right to be completely candid. There was a wide gulf between powerful and genuine art, executed with complete sincerity and the luridly cheap and sensational which had no artistic merit at all. But it was a feeling she could not entirely overcome.
Always in the back of her mind was the thought: Is he really like his drawings; is that the kind of person he is?
She knew that if such a yardstick were to be rigorously applied two-thirds of the world's great artists and great writers would stand condemned. The erotic was an important aspect of all life—to deny it honest expression was to emasculate art, to do violence to reality in all of its gustier aspects—the kind of reality you found in Swift and Cervantes, Chaucer and Defoe, Goya and Gauguin and Cezanne.
But knowing all that, never doubting it for a moment, why was she trembling again now? Why had something about his drawings, the faint aura of morbidity that seemed to hover over them, made her fearful and suspicious again?
Was it because she had at the beginning imagined that a mad killer might be following her; that morbidity and madness were often closely allied? Was it because she had suddenly begun to realize that deception, too, could be a fine art—if a man were a killer at heart?
He might be everything that he claimed to be, a young, unhappy and frustrated artist, desperately seeking commercial success, and still be a youth with a gun who had allowed his morbidity to drive him over the borderline. A youth with an imagined grievance against Lathrup, compulsively driven to seek redress for that grievance through an act of brutal violence.
When had he called at the office, seeking an interview which had been denied him? Yesterday ... two or three days ago? She had failed to ask him. Not that morning, surely, not before—