"It is not far," she said, prolonging Paradise for him.
A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack paused at the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an old octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of withdrawals.
"No, sir! No more, you tempter!" he declared. "No more, you unctuous ambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as high as the Roman Pantheon!"
The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from danger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of that clerk.
"I'll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs of the popular novels fresh from the press!" he said.
Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stock still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glance hovered back and forth between Jack's face and Mary's, and then met Jack's look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks of New York.
"Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days! The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is only the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular in their day—Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And not one Velasquez"—evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings after his shock at seeing Jack—"no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! I go home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up! Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homer and our exile Whistler, who annexed Japan, and our Sargent, born in Florence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, my broad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter's umbrella, to that tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the Grand Canyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise."
The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath. He was ready to yield the floor to Jack.
"I kissed my hand to Diana for you!" said Jack. "And what do you think? The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and small fluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note."
"Did you open that note?" asked the Doge in haughty suspicion.