And Jim Pendleton—what is he thinking, feeling? He is suave, quiet, controlled. He is very gentle with them all, and particularly soft-spoken with Alicia. He has taken to consulting and confabulating with her touching the characteristics and the needs of the children. At times it seems to me that I cannot bear it and once at least I have called her and spoken harshly to her, and charged her with having mislaid a volume of Book Prices Current.
How childish on my part! But my nerves are not what once they were. They are tetchy and fractious. It has been decreed that I am to have a vacation and go away for a fortnight—go to Maine or New Hampshire. If I were to burst into laughter at the thought, I might end like an hysterical woman, in uncontrollable tears. I could no more go now than I could spread my arms and fly. I am as remote from the holiday spirit as from the North Star.
Poor Dibdin—how mistaken he is in me! He blathers of my "towering head and shoulders"—b-r-r-r! it makes me shudder with shame. What a weakling I am in the face of life!
No—I am a toiler in Bleecker Street, of its reeking pavements, its fly-infested purlieus, where the Italian children grub and shout and sun themselves in the gutters, in the air of a thousand smells throbbing under the noonday sun. The homecoming to the third-rate suburb used to be refreshing and soothing like a delicate perfume. To see the children laughing and rosy in the square inch of garden, to see Alicia, sparkling with her young energy and enthusiasm,—it had all been like coming into a cool temple filled with shapes of beauty, after wandering in some fetid bazaar. Now it is dust and ashes. I could never convey to Dibdin or to any one else how alone I feel in the world, what chill and cutting blasts of desolation sweep into my life every time I think of its present or its future.
Minot Blackden came in to Visconti's at noon to-day to drag me out to lunch.
"Let's stop in at my studio for a minute," he proposed as he steered me round a corner. "Something for you to see."
He showed me a small rose window designed for some church in Cincinnati and turned expectantly to catch my exclamations. I gasped out some inanities.
"Art, my boy!" he gloated. "That's art for you!"
"It is, indeed!" I assented helplessly. "Only surprising thing is how a real artist can acquire so much fame. Seems to me I see something about you in every Sunday newspaper I take up."
"Ah, that's business instinct," he chuckled. "I am no amateur, I can tell you. I live this thing. You may think it insane, but sometimes I think I am Benvenuto Cellini reincarnated." He was not laughing; he was in deadly earnest. "Come in," he added solemnly, directing me to a door in the rear of his shop. "I want to introduce you to my press agent."