The young woman thus distinguished by the special appeal waived the responsibility of assent to the last proposition. But she moved away from the little group of suspicious critics, drawing near to the picture, as if she were willing to represent the sympathetic intelligence.
“Yes,” she murmured slyly, “that leg half in the water, half out, is subtle. The flesh gives itself to the coolness.”
Mrs. Anthon began ostentatiously to use her lorgnette on the room. Sebastian Anthon turned one or two canvases to the light.
“Ah!” the young artist responded, “my dear Miss Anthon, you are the right sort; you understand. Don’t you feel that back rippling into the new medium? To do the little bit where the lights change,” he indicated hastily a patch of rough brushwork, “that was the keenest delight of the past year, the best minutes of intense existence, and for that we artists live, don’t we?”
The girl half smiled as if something vaguely humorous crossed her mind, yet again her impulse was to take his part against his antipathetic fellow-countrymen.
“Well, that cornfield didn’t grow in the States, I’d bet!” This ejaculation came from a young man, who had unearthed a sketch in bright yellows. He stood with his cane behind his back, his light coat thrown open, in an attitude of eager expectation, and anxiety to lose nothing that was going on, while hunting for appropriate expression. The dull Paris sunlight of a November afternoon sobered the robust hue of his face and his broad hands. “Eh!” Erard remarked indifferently, “that’s a sketch I made in Calabria, an effort in yellows.” He turned the canvas back to the wall, as if he would take from a child a fragile toy.
“This impressionistic business is beyond me,” the young man remarked defiantly, addressing Mrs. Anthon for support.
“Adela hasn’t done much in it yet,” Mrs. Anthon answered. “You know, Mr. Wilbur, she’s at Jerome’s. He’s good for the drawing, they say, and then he has so many studios, and one is up our way, just behind the Madeleine. And Jerome has such a good class of young women. I couldn’t have Adela running about and living as the common art-students do. No Trilby stuff for me, I said to Sebastian, when he advised me to take Adela over here and let her have a chance to culture herself. Adela rather wanted to try it by herself for a year, but her father made her keep on at Bryn Mawr, that school down near Baltimore, where they wear caps and gowns. But when her father died,—her elder brother was married and living out to Denver, and Walter was just finishing school at Harvard,—I said I couldn’t be left alone. What are children good for, if they’re going to run away to college and to art-schools? It is bad enough to have them marry, but a girl, when she isn’t obliged to work,—and Addie won’t have to teach, I guess—”
Mrs. Anthon was fast unwinding her philosophy of life, in the sympathetic manner of Western Americans, that takes for granted a neighbour’s interest in one’s affairs and does not comprehend reticence. Wilbur was apparently interested. But Miss Anthon, who had practised the power of watching ever for her mother’s garrulous tongue, while she attended to other matters, interfered.
“Mr. Erard will show us his den, mamma. Isn’t the apartment delightful and interesting? It’s an old swell’s house. Louis seize complete, just as it was, without any change. Mr. Erard found it quite by accident, he says, one day when he was wandering about in this quarter among the convents. He came down a side lane that runs into the rue Vaugirard. Just as he was leaving it, his eye happened to fall upon that old cypress in the court. He prowled about and found this nest.”