Jean absorbed more than the true rank and value of Velasquez's portraiture. Wet or dry, the weather was irreproachable. Did it rain, there were yet other picture dealers' secluded galleries where one might loiter luxuriously; while for the intervals of sunshine the no less fascinating shop-windows awaited, each a glimpse into the wonderland of Europe, which her guide seemed to know so well. They even discussed going on to the Metropolitan to look in at a Frans Hals and a Rembrandt, which the talk of Velasquez suggested, but Atwood's absurd watch, corroborated by several equally ridiculous clocks of the neighborhood, said plainly that it was well past closing time at the museum and indeed quite the day's end here among the shops.
He was loath to let her go.
"It's been like a too short trip abroad," he said. "I hate to book for home just yet. Why can't we dine as we did last night?"
She shook her head.
"Yesterday was an occasion."
"Say Italy?" he persisted. "We've skimmed England, France, the Low Countries; why not Italy? I know a little place that's as Italian as Naples. You would never guess its existence. It looks like every other brownstone horror outside, with not a hint of its real business, for they say old Gaetano Sanfratello has no license. He looks you over through the basement grating, and, if you're found worthy, leads you through a tunnel of a hallway into the most wonderful kitchen you ever saw. It's as clean as clean and is a regular treasure-house of shining copper. Then you'll find yourself out in what prosaic New York calls a back yard, but which, in fact, is a trattoria in the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel, whose lithograph you will see above the door. There are clusters of ripening grapes in the trellis overhead, and Chianti or Capri antico—real Capri—on the cloth below; and they'll serve you such artichoke soups, cheese soufflés, and reincarnations of the chestnut, as the gods eat! And Gaetano's pretty daughter will wait upon us and sing 'Bella Napoli,' and perhaps, if we're in great luck, she'll let us have a peep at her bambino which she keeps swaddled precisely like the one in that copy of Luca della Robbia you are staring at this minute. Aren't you tempted?"
She was, but resisted successfully; and when he saw that she was inflexible, he walked with her to her own street, planning other holidays of a future which should know no shadows.
"You must forget that gray time you've left behind you," he declared. "Call this your real beginning—your rebirth, your renaissance."
So in truth it was. The weeks following were weeks of rapid growth and ripening, which, Atwood's influence admitted, yet found their compelling force in the girl's own will. The ambition to do her utmost for MacGregor, to learn what books could teach of the life he knew by living, took her back repeatedly to the library; then other suggestions of the studio, which, even at its narrowest, was a school of curious knowledge about common things that few, save the artist, seemed to see as they were. Who but he, for instance, stopped to consider that sunlight filtering through leaves fell in circles; that shadows were violet, not black; that tobacco smoke from the mouth was of another color than the graceful spiral which rose from the tip of a cigarette? But this field opened into innumerable others in the wide domain where her two friends plied their differing talents; while these, in turn, marched with the boundaries of others still, whose only limits were Humanity's. Life itself set the true horizon to MacGregor's Oasis.
Among MacGregor's intimates who shared the secret of a knock which admitted them at all hours, but who, busy men themselves, came oftenest after the north light failed, was a sculptor named Karl Richter. This man's specialty was the American Indian, but he also had known the Arab at first-hand, and Africa in one or another of its myriad phases was ever the topic when he and MacGregor foregathered. Listening to their talk, Jean came to visualize the bronze-skinned folk, the vivid market-places, the wild music of hautboys and tom-toms, the gardens of fig and olive and orange and palm, the waysides thicketed with bamboo, tamarisk, or scarlet geranium, and the desert,—above all, the mysterious, terrible, beautiful desert,—as things which her own senses had known. It chanced one day that they spoke of camels and, as often, began to argue; and that Richter, to prove his point, whipped from his pocket a lump of modeling wax, which, under his wonderful fingers, became in a twinkling a striking counterfeit of the beast itself. It could not have been more than an inch in height, but it was a very camel, stubborn, complaining, alive. MacGregor confuted, the sculptor annihilated the little animal with a careless pinch, tossed the wax aside, and soon after went his way.