They were in the great salon in the half-darkness of the silken curtains. Although it was broad daylight outside, lighted lamps shed a yellow glow and sparkled amid the glass of the chandeliers and the gold frames of paintings. A valet announced two ladies—“Mme. and Mlle. de Grojean!” The countess hastened toward them.
Ethel was looking vaguely into the depths of the room. Two other visitors came in, talking together like friends.
“His Highness the Duke of Morgania.
CHAPTER XII
ETHEL’S IDEA OF A MAN
As a consequence of their meeting, Ethel became Phil’s pupil. Having made his acquaintance at the Comtesse de Donjeon’s, she gave him a “chance,” as grandma had told her to do. She ordered from him two pictures according to ideas of her own: first, Eugénie young and beautiful, present in the emperor’s cabinet at the reception of Rowrer, the grandfather; then Miss Rowrer had him paint Eugénie aged and broken, seated by the window and looking far away on the empty Place of the Tuileries. Better and better satisfied, she ordered from him grandma’s and her own portrait. These orders were enough to “launch” Phil, as they say, and brought him other orders from the society frequented by Miss Rowrer.
Ethel, before she came to Phil, had been working in the École des Beaux-Arts; but there the studio seemed gloomy to her and she stifled in it. Moreover, she was already rather tired of the Latin Quarter on account of her fellow-countrymen whom she met there.
She had a grudge against some of them for imitating and even exaggerating the most foolish faults of a certain class of students. She did not approve their wearing their hair like a horse’s mane, their velvet trousers and knit-woolen jackets, and their way of carrying around with them boxes and brushes and canvases as if they were sign-painters. And when she saw them seated on the curbstone terrasses before cafés, drinking in public and spitting everywhere and puffing the smoke of their cigarettes into the faces of the passers-by, it exasperated her. She had a desire to call out to them: “Up! and go to work!”
As she did not like the art academies of the Quarter, she decided for Phil’s studio. She had another reason for doing this. The École des Beaux-Arts was too near, and Ethel needed exercise. In spite of the enormous distance to Phil’s studio, she always went to it on foot—“to keep myself in training,” she said. She came back the same way—to give herself an appetite. Thus every morning she had four hours’ work and two hours’ walk—just to keep “in shape.”
Ethel, one morning, was at the studio with Mlle. Yvonne de Grojean. The model’s rest was over and they were beginning work again. The concierge—the old man “of my time” and former inspector of the Louvre roofs—mounted the table and posed before the girls dressed as a Louis Quinze marquis. There was a pushing about of easels and chairs, palettes were taken up, and at once the model was beset with remarks: