“Mr. Lyhne—Mrs. Boye; Mr. Frithjof Petersen—Mrs. Boye.”
It was Erik who performed the introduction, and it took place in Mikkelsen’s studio, a light, spacious room with a floor of stamped clay and a ceiling twenty-five feet high. At one end of the room two portals led to the yard; at the other, a series of doors opened into the smaller studios within. Everything was gray with the dust of clay and plaster and marble. It had made the cobweb threads overhead as thick as twine and had drawn river maps on the large window-panes. It filled eyes and nose and mouth and outlined muscles, hair, and draperies on the medley of casts that filled the long shelves running round the room and made them look like a frieze from the destruction of Jerusalem. Even the laurels, high trees planted in big tubs in a corner near one of the portals, were powdered till they became grayer than gray olives.
Erik stood at his modelling in the middle of the studio wearing his blouse and with a paper cap on his dark, wavy hair. He had acquired a moustache and looked quite manly beside his two friends, who had just taken their bachelor’s degree and, still pale and tired from their examinations, looked provincially proper with their too new clothes and their too closely cropped heads in rather large caps.
At a little distance from Erik’s scaffolding, Mrs. Boye sat in a low high-backed chair, holding a richly bound book in one hand and a lump of clay in the other. She was small, quite small, and slightly brunette in coloring, with clear, light brown eyes. Her skin had a luminous whiteness, but in the shadows of the rounded cheek and throat it deepened to a dull golden tone which went well with the burnished hair of a dusky hue changing to a tawny blondness in the high lights.
She was laughing when they came in, as a child laughs—a long, merry peal, gleefully loud, delightfully free. Her eyes, too, had the artless gaze of a child, and the frank smile on her lips seemed all the more childlike because the shortness of her upper lip left the mouth slightly open revealing milk-white teeth.
But she was no child.
Was she a little and thirty? The fullness of the chin did not say “No,” nor the ripe glow of the lower lip. Her figure was well rounded with firm, luxuriant outlines accentuated by the dark blue dress, which fitted snugly as a riding-habit around her waist, arms, and bosom. A dull crimson silk kerchief lay in rich folds around her neck and over her shoulders, its ends tucked into the low pointed neck of her bodice. Carnations of the same color were fastened in her hair.
“I am afraid we interrupted a pleasant reading,” said Frithjof with a glance at the richly bound book.
“No, indeed—not in the least. We had been quarrelling for a full hour about what we read,” replied Mrs. Boye. “Mr. Refstrup is a great idealist in everything that has to do with art, while I think it’s dreadfully tiresome—all this about the crude reality that has to be purified and clarified and regenerated and what not until there is just pure nothingness left. Do me the favor of looking at that Bacchante of Mikkelsen’s—the one which deaf Traffelini over there is cutting in marble. If I were to enter her in a descriptive catalogue.... Good heavens! Number 77. A young lady in negligé is standing thoughtfully on both her feet and doesn’t know what to do with a bunch of grapes. She should crush those grapes if I had my way—crush them till the red juice ran down her breast—now shouldn’t she? Don’t you agree with me?” and she caught Frithjof by the sleeve, almost shaking him in her childlike eagerness.
“Yes,” Frithjof admitted; “yes, I do think there is something lacking—something of freshness—of spontaneity—”