Reggie had told me about that. He was irritated at papa for sending Lorenz there, and he said he hoped he would not appear again.
I told Mr. Sands all about Lorenz and also about the Count I had worked for; about papa, some of whose work the Duke of Argyle had taken back to England with him, as representative of Canadian art (which it was not—papa had studied in France, and was an Englishman, not a Canadian), and of my own “studio.” While I talked, Mr. Sands went on painting. The model watched me with, I thought, a very sad expression. Her dark eyes were as gentle and mournful as a Madonna’s. She didn’t look unlike our family, being dark and foreign-looking. She was French. Mr. Sands was painting her arms and hands on the figure on the canvas. He explained that the face belonged to the wife of Senator Chase. She was the leader of a very smart set in Brookline. He said the ladies who sat for their portraits usually got tired by the time their faces were finished, and he used models for the figures, and especially the hands.
“The average woman,” said Mr. Sands, “has extreme ugly hands. The hands of Miss St. Denis, as you see, are beautiful—the most beautiful hands in America.”
I was standing by him at the easel, watching him paint, and I asked him if it were really a portrait, for the picture looked more like a Grecian dancing figure. Mr. Sands smiled and said:
“That’s the secret of my success, child. I never paint portraits as portraits. I dress my sitters in fancy costumes and paint them as some character. There is Mrs. Olivet. Her husband is a wholesale grocer. I am going to paint her as Carmen. This spirituelle figure with the filmy veil about her is Mrs. Ash Browning, a dead-and-alive, wishy-washy individual; but, as you see, her ‘beauty’ lends itself peculiarly to the nymph she there represents.”
I was so much interested in listening to him, and watching him work, that I had forgotten what I had come to see him about, till presently he said:
“So you are going to join the classes at the Academy?”
That question recalled me, and I said hastily:
“I hope so, by-and-by. First, though, I shall have to get some work to do.”
He stopped painting and stared at me, with his palette in his hand, and as he had looked at me when he opened the door.