“Married you shall be,” she said with the air of an oracle, “and before the year is out. I swear it.”
“But why do you want me to——”
“Revenge!” she said tragically. “You helped marry me to Mort.”
And the young matron was as good as her word, though her method may have been unusual.
It came about in the following manner, and Burnett’s brother and Miss Millicent Darrow were her unconscious agents. Miss Darrow had gone to the Academy Exhibit. The rooms were comfortably crowded. She entered conscious of a certain dignity and repose in the character of her surroundings. She brought forth her catalogue, resolutely opened it to the first page and in a moment was oblivious to the people about her. She did not belong to the great army “who know what they like.” She had an instinctive perception of the good, and found herself not a little amazed at the amount of masterly work by younger men whose names she had never heard. It was an unpleasant commentary upon the mentality and taste of the set in which she moved, and she was conscious of a sense of guilt; for was she not a reflection of the shortcomings of those she was so ready to condemn? “The Plain—Evening—William Hazelton”—a direct rendering of an upland field at dusk, between portraits by well-known men; “Sylvia—Henry Marlow”—a girl in a green bodice painted with knowledge and assurance.
In another room were the things in a higher key—she knew them at a glance; and on the opposite wall a full-length portrait that looked like a Sargent. She was puzzled at the color, which was different from that of any man she remembered. The Sargents she knew were grouped in another room—and yet there was here the force and breadth of the master. She experienced the same perplexity—“Agatha—Philip Burnett,” said the catalogue. She sank upon a bench before it and gave herself up to quiet rapture.
“If I were a man,” she said at last, “that is how I should wish to paint, the drawing of Sargent, the poetry of Whistler, the grace of Alexander, the color of Benson. Philip Burnett,” she apostrophized, “I’m a Philistine. Forgive me.”