"Physically she is perfect," insisted Moreton. "Can it be possible that you, a poet and artist, have all these years overlooked, ignored, waived aside such a model? I tell you, Reynolds, she's a genuine wood nymph, don't you know, a dryad whom the satyrs have scared out of her wits. I never saw such eyes, such lips and——"
"Oh come now," said Reynolds, "I am not going to listen to such nonsense. Besides, it strikes me as next to brutal to think of discussing the charms of an arid, dull, ugly little cracker girl——well no, not a cracker, either, a Sandlapper is the local phrase. The fact that such girls exist and must become women and be mothers of like beings, is to me a subject that it is a virtue to shun. On such a theme seriousness is disheartening, levity is diabolical."
"Every thing au sérieux, as of old!" exclaimed Moreton, "you bewildering old philanthropist! I am too happy to quarrel with you now. Wait till the newness of having discovered your hiding place has somewhat rubbed off and I'll give you punch for punch with a will. But I do say, in all candor, that I never was so struck with any bit of wild beauty as I was with that queer, solemn-eyed girl of White's. She might make any painter's fortune as a Daphne or——"
Reynolds interrupted him:
"It is only once in a century or two," he said, "that the world's intermittent sentiment will permit a Millet or a Burns to cast the glamor of genius over the stolid ugliness and the immitigable emptiness of peasant life. As for me, I have no sympathy with it from the standpoint of art. There is no artistic alchemy that can make a sow's ear fine or beautiful. Those who undertake to idealize ignorance, stupidity and coarseness are worse than such realists as Zola, because they willfully deceive those whom they succeed in interesting."
"Go on, wade out, you know I can't follow you," exclaimed Moreton. "I love the shallow places, the soft sweet edges of all sorts of streams; but I'll bet five to one on you for touching bottom at all points and without weights!"
Reynolds laughed and waved aside the wine his friend offered.
At this moment a portly gentleman, wearing a bland smile between his iron-gray mutton-chop whiskers, and a vast gold seal below his vest, approached Moreton from another part of the large dining room. This was Mr. Hawkins Noble, a person of importance in Birmingham, a banker in fact, whose money and financial sagacity had given to that prosperous little city the larger part of its vim and activity. It was to be seen at a glance that he was what some one has aptly and inelegantly phrased as a "big fish in a little puddle." He was a New Yorker, and his connection with a great banking house in the metropolis had followed him to Birmingham with the effect of a separate atmosphere circulating close about his stout figure. There was in his movements a celerity quite out of keeping with his heavy limbs and rotund body, and his small blue eyes had a twinkle which was a compromise between the glint of ice and the genial reflection from a June sky. He rubbed his hands together as he came near the table.
"Hello, Moreton," he exclaimed, with the intonation of one speaking at a telephone, "pardon me for interrupting you, but I have a matter of importance. Oh, keep your seat," he hastily added, as Moreton made a movement to rise, "it's nothing in the slightest private, only an urgent invitation for you to join me in a most delightful bit of field sport. General DeKay, who owns a grand plantation and quail preserve below here, has sent me word to collect a party of gentlemen and bring them next week for a few days' shooting. How does that strike you?"
"It strikes me deuced hard," answered Moreton. "Don't you know I never did refuse a thing like that, never."