Poppea of the Post-Office

by Mabel Osgood Wright

"Time will prove," said Jeanne, half sadly. By the very insistence of certain word combinations this commonplace saying of his wife refused to leave Latimer's memory, and even though it failed in any way to impress him, it left an irritation like the prick of an invisible thorn.

Meanwhile, Poppea and Philip drew nearer together each day.

Howell was finishing a large and important piece of work at his Westboro studio, and for this reason remained there during the summer, and there it was that Philip went every day. The master, to test his creative quality, told him to set about the bit of work he felt he would most like to do, and that he would help him with the technique. Philip's response had been to bring a rough crayon sketch that he had made of Poppea's head and shoulders the last summer when he, looking over the parapet, had seen her pick up a little bird that had fallen from the nest and, after holding it in her hand a moment to still its flutterings, put it back with its brothers. Under the drawing was written Amor Consolatrix.

"Who is it?" the sculptor had asked abruptly. "She will make a good model. I will send for her to come up here if she lives in the neighborhood, as I suppose she does."

"Oh! I couldn't ask her; she isn't a model, but I can remember her face as well as if she were here. Is it not perfect?"

"Head is well set on; forehead, eyes, and chin good; nose a bit too much tipped up for classic proportions." Then, as he saw Philip's face flush and quiver, he added "After all, noses are a matter of taste nowadays when we are getting a long way on the road from Greek placidity, that in the female face expressed little but form, toward the expression of temperament. She'll do, my lad, she'll do; if for no other reason than that you think so.

"Who is she, that is neither a model nor askable?" he inquired a half hour later, as he looked over from his work to where Philip was wrestling mentally and physically with the lump of clay of the size for a bust that the attendant had set upon its block.

"Poppea Gilbert; she lives at the post-office in our town, and there is nobody quite like her," Philip answered, his shyness suddenly rent by the man's offhand air of comradeship, as well as in response to his own need of some one to whom he might speak without restraint.

Howell seldom took pupils, and the price that John Angus had offered him for his services would not alone have tempted him, but the boy had interested him from the first. Now, as he stood there watching the eager face, the light in his eyes, the energy with which he was attacking a well-nigh impossible task, he sighed and said to himself: "So long as he believes there is no one like her, whoever she may be, so long will he be able to work. Her strength will make up for his lack—but if his belief ends—" Here Howell had made an unconscious downward gesture that in its expression of complete destruction knocked the index finger from the outstretched hand of the figure upon which he was impressing the final details.

For Poppea the last year had been rather lonely, so that the post-office work was welcomed as a distraction as much as a necessity. A break had come in the one companionship of her life, for after graduation from college and the law school, Hugh Oldys, to carry out the carefully laid plans of his father, was spending a year in foreign travel before settling in New York, where a niche was waiting for the young man of whose ability and qualities of determination no one who had come in contact with him during his college life had any doubt.