Miss Anthon looked puzzled and hopeless at his blasphemy. Authority still counted for much in her mind. The sculptor returned to bow them out, with the same fat, complacent smile with which he had welcomed them.
“The old fool will live to see his stuff despised,” Erard remarked carelessly, when they were on the street again. “They are all trying to tell their story in another language, straining to utter the impossible. But Matthews isn’t. He’s the American you made so much of in New York and Chicago. He doesn’t try any experiments,—he knows too much finance for that,—but he tells the whole story. Dancing girls and little boys and Venuses,—the usual outfit, as Wilbur would say.”
Then they crossed the Quarter to Matthews’ studio, which was a much more habitable place than Sader’s chilly shed. They found the sculptor entertaining a fashionably dressed woman and her escort. This Mrs. Warmister, whom Erard seemed to know rather intimately, was poking about the studio in a nervous manner, emitting now and then admiring exclamations. The young man with an impressive manner—Erard called him Salters—tried clumsily to follow her inconsequential chatter. The sculptor smoked a cigarette with a bored air, while engaging in the elusive talk. “This kind of person infests the studios,” Erard whispered to his companion, indicating the voluble Mrs. Warmister. “She booms Matthews, socially, and all that.”
After a short chat with Matthews, who made Miss Anthon feel that she was at an afternoon tea, they drove back towards the busy avenues along the river.
“He makes his ten thousand a year,” Erard commented. “Nothing there you couldn’t take in at a glance. The glorification of the obvious.” In the intervals of street-racket Erard’s phrases dropped like little pieces of hail. “But he is on a safer road than old Sader. He has stuck to the tradition of his art, not tried to paint with a chisel or to tell stories with a brush.”
Miss Anthon was depressed and silent. The conflict of theories and ideals, instead of exciting her, as at first, was subduing. “There’s something suggestive to me in Sader’s place, though,” she remonstrated at last. “We are all striving for some kind of freedom, for some escape, and his figures make you feel that impulse.”
When the cab stopped at her hotel, she remembered gratefully that Mrs. Anthon had sallied forth with an acquaintance for the afternoon.
“So you are searching for the means to express an unutterable longing?” Erard questioned mischievously, when they were alone.
She looked at him restlessly before replying, then said impulsively,—
“Shall I ever do anything? Tell me—what is there for me?”