“Perhaps it would be best not to complicate affairs,” Miss Anthon responded coldly, having gained control of the situation once more.
“No, no, but,” he added irrelevantly, “you are a great woman. You can get what you have a mind to. Good-by.”
He held out his hand. She shook it cordially, exhilarated by his frank appreciation. “And a quick return, shall I say?”
His face beamed; in a moment she was angry with herself for her unconsidered remark. “Why, of course I am anxious to hear that my stock is selling at one twenty-five. But perhaps a letter would do as well.”
Yet when he had gone, his solid presence and dominating assurance once out of the stuffy little room of rasping red velours, she had a strange sensation of emptiness. Wilbur’s connection with the ordinary facts of existence seemed so immediate and normal. She was more convinced than ever that she had done shrewdly in linking her fortunes with his. Whatever came of the dollars, she would be a larger woman from having grasped hands intimately with this plain person.
CHAPTER VI
After Wilbur’s departure for Chicago on his quest for two fortunes, Miss Anthon came to see much of Simeon Erard; she accepted him more easily, now that the young business man’s normal humour was not present to supply a good-natured criticism. Erard was training her, she told Mrs. Anthon when she was in a provoking mood. He was teaching her what to see and how to see it. More subtly, he was training her in values.
Erard had shown her the famous new picture by Degas; what was more exciting, had presented the painter himself. One clear day he had taken her out to a quiet studio at Passy, where she had seen a great master at work on a fresco for an American building. Again, they had visited old Sader at work on his marvellous gates, which had been on the way for a dozen years. Sader seemed to her a very undistinguished person,—thickset, with a long grizzled beard, and like a tradesman in his cotton blouse. The sculptor shut the door after them and locked it; and, as if to waive commonplaces, pointed to the famous gates. While she was speculating over these huge clay panels, which seemed to her roughly broken by scrolls and dashes, Sader mumbled, “One is Fire; the other Water—Dante.” Then Erard pointed here and there to strange little figures, flung on, stuck on carelessly, as if attached to the panels by chance when finished. Each figure, part worm, part man, seemed to writhe in agony. When her eyes wandered over the gates, they presented the blur she had first caught. She felt disappointed with herself and ashamed of her feeble imagination.
Erard and Sader came to her rescue by calling her attention to other pieces of work,—heads of children, fauns, half-completed allegories. In an adjoining room a young man, who looked like an intelligent workman, was slowly chiselling at the curls of a head. Erard pointed out another subject, which she thought was half-finished,—a delicate head emerging, as from a lake, out of the hard white block. The pure bold outline of the face, the features scraped to an ascetic thinness, were accentuated by the roughness of the unfinished marble. Near by was a group, a man and a woman in a convulsive embrace, half caught in the marble, half emergent, as if struggling in all their tense limbs to escape from the bondage of the stone.
“That’s his trick,” whispered Erard, when Sader had withdrawn to the gates. “A kind of impressionism in marble. He does a lot of these little things. You can call ’em what you like,—Adam and Eve, Paolo and Francesca, Life and Death.”