Mrs. Gilderman, though she had not recovered from her confinement with the rapidity that a washerwoman might have done under the same circumstances, was, nevertheless, so nearly quite well by the end of the month as to be able to be down-stairs and about the house. She did not go much abroad. Maybe on a fine afternoon she would take a spin in the park in the automobile or out along the river, but she did not go shopping, and was yet watched by her nurse with the jealous care due to a convalescent patient of such pre-eminent importance. But, though she did not go abroad, her friends came to see her, and she often held receptions in her own room with tea and wafers, maybe, and a babble of feminine chatter. She was conscious that her imported blue tea-gown was vastly becoming to her blond beauty, and she made the most of it, lying back in a nest of blue silk, silver-embroidered cushions.
It was about this time that she made Gilderman promise to have his portrait painted. “I want Reginald to have it to say,” she said, “that that is the way my father looked in the year that I was born.”
So Gilderman had commissioned Norcott to paint a full-length portrait of himself with a bit of realistic background showing a glimpse of the famous Cyprian Adonis fragment. No one living could do those little realistic bits of background as could Norcott.
During this same month the Biddington-De Vaux wedding was to come off at the national capital–Arabella Stewart Biddington and Lord George De Vaux, an attaché to a foreign embassy. Gilderman, on the score of relationship to Miss Biddington, had, of course, to go. That same day he was also to give a sitting to Norcott. He was growing very tired of these sittings. There had been a great many of them, for Norcott was endeavoring to make the work a chef-d’œuvre. At first Gilderman had been very much interested in the artist, his surroundings, and the studio in which he worked. Not only had Norcott much to say for himself, but he had collected about him an enormous amount of bric-à-brac, rugs, tapestries, and hangings. You would have pronounced the anteroom to the studio to have been cluttered were the things gathered there less fine and interesting than they were. The studio itself was a great, high-ceilinged room with a big skylight. There was more bric-à-brac, rugs, tapestries here, but in the wider spaces they did not seem so crowded together as in the anteroom. Gilderman had become pretty well acquainted with all these surroundings by now, and they were no longer so interesting to him as they had been at first. He sat there in the morning of the Biddington-De Vaux wedding feeling rather bored. He had to take the trip to the capital in the afternoon, too. That also was a bore in prospect.
The outer door of the reception-room of Norcott’s studio was so arranged that when it opened a chime of bells was rung. Norcott was working silently and industriously and Gilderman was sitting thinking about the nuisance of the impending journey, when suddenly the chime of bells rang out upon the silence of the studio. Presently Norcott’s Moorish servant came bringing in a card. Norcott looked at it. “It’s Santley Foord, Mr. Gilderman,” he said. “Would you like him to come in? He’s a very interesting fellow, and it might entertain you.”
“Santley Foord?” said Gilderman. And then, remembering the name: “Oh yes; he’s the fellow who wrote and illustrated those very interesting articles about the West-China imbroglio for the Mundane Sphere, is he not?”
“Yes, that’s the man.”
“I’d be very glad to meet him,” said Gilderman, welcoming any break in the monotony of the sitting.
Then Santley Foord came in. He was a lively, brisk little man, with a face burned russet-brown by the sun, a mustache nearly white, and very light, closely cropped gray hair. He had a strong jaw and chin, and his little eyes were as bright and as black as beads and danced and twinkled and were never still for a moment. Norcott introduced Gilderman, who bowed with a manner that was very urbane. Santley Foord was evidently extremely gratified by the introduction.
“I was very much interested in your West-China articles,” said Gilderman. “It seemed to me that your sketches were strikingly clever, too. That one with the dead bodies lying on the snow and the flock of crows around them and the long line of road cut through the snow and stretching away to the distance against the gray sky impressed me extremely.”