“What is the good of my doing all this, if I am to be hawked about Europe for a few months more and then carried back to America disgraced, shopworn, because I haven’t been a large bait for the European market! It is all scraps, everything I do, and I am tired of it! A woman’s life is like a garment pinned together—there is no whole piece in it.”
“There is always marriage of one sort or another.”
Miss Anthon looked at him contemptuously. Why didn’t he make love to her, as he probably did to Miss Parker, to Mrs. Warmister? Was she too conventional? What ought she to do? Go to his studio accompanied only by a maid as this woman did, make herself nude of all proprieties, smoke and drink with him, and discuss the physiological aspects of passion and art? And yet if he should advance that way, she would snub him, taking pleasure in showing him that however much he might interest her, she despised his personal habits.
She rose abruptly and walked back to the salon where Salters was lecturing Mrs. Warmister and Miss Parker on some Japanese water-colours. Mrs. Warmister glanced up as they entered, measuring Miss Anthon swiftly with a disagreeable smile on her lips.
Miss Anthon, in chance intervals of leisure, accomplished some of the work on manuscripts that Erard had suggested. This occupation served as an excuse to bring them together, and, in order to escape from Mrs. Anthon, they took long walks in parts of Paris she had not known before. Paris this autumn was to her altogether a new city, a strange, complex being with a human heart in rebellion with fate and law. It seemed to say, ‘We will to be irresponsible, O God! We know not the morrow, your morrow, and we care not for it. Thou, God, hast given us a few poor nerves, some dying passions, and many evil fancies. With these we will play out your little game of dreams in our own manner, thus using up our vilely inadequate bodies.’
They roamed through the black alleys of Montmartre: she had the rebellion of the socialist. Beyond the Invalides lay the domain of artificial peace, of nuns and monks: she would settle the personal confusion of life by a perpetual, fixed idea. Nearer the river the old cathedral raised its towers, out of a past, lusty age into the trivial present. The little insects who manufactured petty art for this present world swarmed near by: she would join them and play at making an Apollo come forth from a café-chantant.
“No, no,” she proclaimed to herself, “not marriage, but absorption in some effort. That will give freedom!”
Then she remembered Erard’s remark, “There is no freedom, except the freedom to feel: the nerves must be watched, too, lest they fail.”
And she had a sudden desire to abjure her master.