I stopped myself just in time. I was very nearly saying “sitting to you like that?” The figure on which she was at work was entirely undraped. I do not suppose that Mrs. Ascher would have been the least embarrassed even if I had said “like that.” The artist’s soul scorns conventions. But I should have felt awkward if she had answered “Yes.”
“Not exactly sitting to me,” she said. “He just comes here and talks. While he talks I catch glimpses of his great, buoyant, joyous soul and fashion the poor clay to express it.”
“I did not know he was back in New York,” I said.
“Oh, yes, he has been here a week, perhaps more. To me it seems as if he had been here for ever.”
I could not even guess at what she meant by that so I did not try to answer her.
“I wonder he didn’t look me up,” I said.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Ascher, “he has had no time. That abundant, restless energy of his is for ever pressing out into fresh activities.”
I gathered, more from her tone than from her actual words that only an effete, devitalised creature would call on me. A man of abundant energy would naturally sit half the day in Mrs. Ascher’s studio, while she made a fancy body for him in damp clay.
She clasped her hands and gazed with rapt intensity at the statue of Gorman’s soul.
“His patriotism!” she said. “After living in that atmosphere of nebulous cosmopolitanism which is what we hypercivilised people have created in the world, it is everything to get back to the barbaric simplicity of the old love for country.”