“Mighty easy to say ‘Hold it; hold it!’ Like to see some one else stand on one leg a whole mawnin’ and ‘hold it, hold it!’”
Sassafras glanced over indignantly, but Tootles shook his head in mute warning.
“What the devil’s got into the charcoal!” said Dangerfield presently. He flung aside the piece he was using and selected another, but a few minutes later he broke out into an exclamation, and taking the canvas, brought it down savagely across his knee and flung it across the floor, after which he broke into a short, nervous laugh.
“There—I feel better—can’t work this morning—not in the mood—you go ahead—I’m through!”
He hesitated, picked up his hat, and went out. His mind had run away from him. Try as he might, he had not been able to fix it on the work before him. He felt upset, disorganized, restless, and immeasurably irritated that he should have lost control of his impulse at the very moment when he had been confident of a new birth of inspiration.
He wandered restlessly through ways which he had gone with Inga, ending up for luncheon at the little restaurant with the oyster-bar, where he had sketched with such avidity. Only, nothing interested him. The curious types of pedler and hybrid politician, the melancholy of the old régime, and the audacity of the new generation, which he had seen and studied with avid eye and awakened imagination, to-day bored him immeasurably. He saw neither color, character nor life. They were dirty, cheap, and commonplace. The waiter, a young student from the University of Moscow, a year over, with whom Inga and he had had long interested conversations, came up eagerly, only to be greeted with glum monosyllables.
To some men, Inga’s evasion would have aroused eager senses of pursuit and possession. Not so, Dangerfield. All his instincts rebelled at this sudden disquieting and disorganizing intrusion across the slow ascent toward reclamation which had lain so clearly before him. Whatever her reason for her abrupt flight, he resented the loss of the morning’s work, the interruption of the happy impulse which had reordered the universe for him. He was angry not simply at the incident and the memories of past discouragement it awoke, but for what lay ahead—the fear of the future, the wonder whether he had not reached that period in his relations with Inga when his equanimity and the precious poise of an artist were to be constantly upset by the necessity of following vagrant moods. For he realized now how necessary the girl had become to him, to his restless mind that took fright at a moment’s solitude, to his awakening ambition, ready at a moment to sink back in discouragement, and to something deeper than mind or temperament—to the spark in him that still clung to his youth through the glorious youth in her.
“Why were women sent into the world, anyway?” he thought savagely, spearing a loaf of bread as though he were demolishing the whole sex. “Why have men been given a hidden spring of sentiment that makes a woman’s sympathy a necessity? And why must woman always come into man’s life to divert him from his object?”
What most irritated him was that he had thought Inga of different mold, and now she had suddenly been revealed to him as profoundly disquieting as her frailest sister. This feeling of resentment increased as the lack of her presence in his day made itself felt. He resented that she should have fastened him to herself. He resented that she should have shown a feminine capriciousness, and, most of all, he resented the fact that he should feel such resentment.
He was in this gloomy, destructive state of antagonism, amounting almost to revulsion against Inga, when he looked up and saw her entering the restaurant. She perceived him instantly, stopped, and made as though to withdraw. The movement roused a fury in him. His face grew stern and his glance remained coldly fixed.