“Dead straight.”
“All right; it’s a go,” he said solemnly. “But I’ve got to be at the theater by seven-thirty.”
“I’ll be ready in an hour.”
He nodded acquiescence, more and more puzzled by her manner, and as she ran down to her manicuring, he hesitated at the door of his studio, made a wry face, and went down the hall to Dangerfield’s. The door was open. Belle Shaler was on the model-stand in the garb of a street urchin, hands on her hips, hair tousled, bare-armed, and throat revealed through the ragged blouse. The great yellow rug had been rolled to one side, and two easels were pitched. At one, Inga was working, while, at the other, Dangerfield was filling in a rapid sketch. He paid no attention to O’Leary’s entrance, bending eagerly to his work, clad in loose-flowing corduroy that bore the marks of a hundred skirmishes of the brush, and a gray-flannel shirt.
“Hello, King! Ain’t I a Venus in these mud-rags?” said Belle, with a shrug of her shoulders, for the reasons of this pose, which obliterated her natural graces, were beyond her comprehension. “Say, how did it go? Did Millie land him?”
“Hooked him clear through the gills. Monday’s the night.”
“Hold that pose!” said Dangerfield sharply. Inga sent a warning glance toward O’Leary.
“’Scuses!” said Belle hastily. In Dangerfield’s presence she was unaccountably subdued.
King O’Leary moved silently behind Inga, with an exclamation of pleasure at the charm of her arrangement. Under her deft fingers, the urchin on the model-stand had been blended into the dainty color-scheme for a magazine cover, and, instead of the shabby reality, a fragile, idealized figure with grapevines and clustered purple grapes greeted his eyes.
Then he turned to Dangerfield’s easel with renewed curiosity. Against the white canvas, a figure stood out in glaring boldness, done in flowing, powerful lines, a figure all human flesh and greedy life, defiant, common, vital, astonishing in the power of its ugliness, which no longer had the quality of ugliness, so alive and instantaneous was the unifying spark of the actual which held it together. And King O’Leary understood.