Pansy was of opposite type, soft-eyed, soft-spoken and gentle, without Belle’s beauty of limb, but like a dark and velvety flower, with her soft, oval, blushing face and Oriental eyes which seemed to crowd her eyelids;—all feminine, a virtue by which she had made a deep and disquieting mark on the impressionable heart of Tootles. She knew little of her own life. She had been a model as a child, with blurred memories of older and harsher beings about her who had long since faded away. She had an archness in her smile, and one eyebrow noticeably uplifted, in a manner so strikingly like the baron’s that every one commented on it. Indeed, she might easily have passed for his daughter, nor could he have treated her with more deference, punctiliously surrounding her with formality, always leaving the door open with ostentation when she came to visit him. She was very fond of the aristocratic, lonely old man with an impulsive kindliness which was deep in her nature.
Between their room and the abode of Art and Literature was the home of Ludovic Schneibel, a dentist by necessity, with offices on the third floor, but with a spiritual yearning toward art, literature, and music, and, in particular, the company of artists. He was a squatty, fiery-headed and fiery-worded Swiss-American, in the forties, lame in one leg, and given to velvet coats and flowing neckties. He executed fearful compositions of Alpine storms over leaden lakes with large rainbows in the background, being indeed without any talent but the love of painting, yet selling his canvases to the large department-stores to set off their stock of gilt frames. He worked at night and during holidays, singing unmusically sentimental ballads, with occasional outbursts of yodeling whenever the creative fit was strong. He was a lovable, social tramp, and any rascal in long hair with the requisite jargon could reach his sympathies and his pocketbook. Everything to him was an enthusiasm; Tootles vowed he could go into a paroxysm over a cold potato.
Down the hall, at the extreme back, in the little studio next to King O’Leary’s, was a Miss Inga Sonderson, of whom the Arcade knew as little as they did of Mr. Aristide Jean-Marie Cornelius (if indeed that were his true name, which no one believed). Belle Shaler had posed for her several times—she did posters, covers, and decorative sketches—and had a peaceful memory of filmy coverings and hangings, harmonies in gray and green like the brooding sea, neat couches and window boxes of pungent and bright flowers. She seemed twenty-four or twenty-five—possibly a year or so older—repressed and contemplative—as one who, contrary to the ordinary prejudice, never used conversation to think out loud.
Her body was like a youth’s, firm and supple, and when she moved, the eye went to the hip immediately as a center of grace—of that flowing grace which one sees in the poised female figures on Grecian friezes. Her hair, which was a profound black with the depth in it of a forest pool, had certain blue, furtive gleams which perhaps only an artist would have noticed. She wore it braided and drawn over her forehead in a Swedish coil, rather severe in movement. The face was fragile, unusually dark, with the darkness of the Northlander, and two things were remarkable in it—the eyes and the upper lip, which was unusually sensitive and the first to quiver with any strong emotion which was elsewhere repressed. The eyes were the blue of cold, open waters, with a mist of gray—like a curtain drawn across her soul, beyond which no one, not even the man who came to love her, ever penetrated. She dressed in simple lines and quiet tones, dark blues and black, with only a broad lace collar and cuffs in neat relief. She appeared haughty; Tootles, who, as well as Flick, had been romantically attracted, referred to her as “Lady Vere de Vere.” As a matter of fact, she was not haughty at all, and utterly unaristocratic, as Belle Shaler, that ardent social anarchist, admitted herself. She was simply self-sufficient. Whatever her antecedents, she spoke English naturally, as though she had been born to it, with a low, rather guttural, but pleasant note, curiously soothing; and yet she might have been a waif from a distant Scandinavian region of encroaching night and wan, midnight days. Despite their curiosity, no one would have dreamed of questioning her, not even Belle Shaler, who was unaccountably silent under the sea-blue eyes which looked out at her as though through a mist.
Opposite this room, at the back corner, was the show studio of the Arcade. A genius now passed into society had inhabited it, and the tradition remained. Yet it had had an unlucky history. Those who had held it had not held it long, and the last occupant, a friend of Inga Sonderson’s, Champeno, a young sculptor of great promise, had disappeared under a cloud, leaving his furniture in forfeit. For a month it had stood empty, until several days before the opening of this story, when the rumor went around that it had been let to an artist by the name of Dangerfield, and the curiosity of the Arcade was further excited by the appearance of numerous packing boxes of unusual size, suggesting furniture de luxe.
This was the situation on the sixth floor back among these social stragglers enclosed in narrow prisons of their own choosing, secretly yearning for each other’s company, when on Christmas day, invitations issued jointly by Mr. St. George Kidder, Mr. Flick Wilder, and Mr. King O’Leary fell among them like carnival bombs.
V
There was only one thing in life that bothered Tootles greatly, and that was the getting out of bed in the morning. It was high noon by a shaft of sunlight that beat persistently on his Wellingtonian nose, when he finally determined to try the influence of mind over matter according to a method all his own.