“Sometime you must paint a group like that. Wish I could,” she said, her eyes dwelling on the strong masses and deep colors. “There’s so much in New York—isn’t there?—if you’ll only look.”
He looked up, and, being in a momentary mood of tolerant amusement, smiled at her artifice.
“Want me to be a painter of the slums?”
“Why not?” she said defiantly. “Isn’t it realer than painting pretty pictures—simpering, sugary women—the same old thing again and again? Oh, if I were a man who could—who really could do what I wanted—I’d love it—to get down into the people themselves, to reflect what’s going on below, the color and the soul of the people! It’s only in places like this, where life is natural, that you feel one thing is different from another!”
“What a long speech!” he said, with an amused look. Then he turned serious and thoughtful. “Good sense—you don’t talk much, but when you do——”
He nodded to himself, put out his hand, patted hers, and, though he said no more, he began whistling to himself, his head aslant, his eyes narrowing as he studied the group across the sanded floor.
Then there were the dark moments, feverish days of aimlessness and regret, of heavy forgetfulness, long periods of taciturnity, with sudden, irrelevant speech—speech that came without warning, which seemed rather the man in the mists of his groping, taking counsel with himself. Sometimes what he said was only querulous, thrown out in anger or bitter self-hatred. At other times he seemed to be standing off and looking at himself, viewing his past dispassionately, analyzing his career without prejudice. Once he said to her, as they sat waiting for the dusk to enter the studio:
“Some people like life, like it for the sake of living—at least, I suppose it’s that—to find your rut and run on it smoothly, the same thing to-day as yesterday—routine.”
“Most are like that,” she said, not yet seeing where he wished to come.
“Most—yes. But if you’re not satisfied with that—if you want something—want to create something, to get somewhere—to some fixed object, then you’ve got to face the thing in the end.”