"Oh, but I am, though," returned the other, confidently. "I have no idea what it is, but I'm very much interested in it. And every one says I have the artistic temperament in the highest degree. By the way, what is art, anyway? No one ever told me."
Pelgram gave a preliminary cough, and glanced hastily about the room, but calculating that his audience would be larger later on, he restrained himself.
"What is art?" he slowly repeated, half-closing his eyes and smiling mystically on his guests. "What is art?" Miss Long hung breathlessly on his words.
As, however, he seemed more interested in the question than apt to reply to it, Wilkinson moved on toward Miss Heatherton and the tea table, while his place was taken by Miss Maitland and her mother, who had just come into the room.
The studio was presently quite full, and conversation rose to a shriller pitch. The talk was mostly of art. Catch phrases indicative of informality and intimacy with the manufacture of the beautiful were recklessly flung about. The pace quickened. The operations of Miss Heatherton and Miss Long threatened speedily to be terminated because of exhausted resources as well as insufficient space. It was warmer, and there was a queer mixed odor of tea, roses, and paint. John M. Hurd, greatly relieved after he discovered that he was not immediately expected to buy anything, was recounting with animation to a fat man in a frock coat how the basis of the family fortune had been laid by Mr. Hurd's grandfather whose one life rule was never to invest his money in anything west of Albany, New York. One of Pelgram's colleagues had pinned Miss Maitland into a corner and was raptly telling her how great an influence a certain old master of whom she had never heard had exerted on the work of an extraordinarily talented young man from Fall River whose name and pictures alike were entirely unknown to her.
Pelgram went by with his arm familiarly passed through that of a phlegmatic-looking young Chinaman whom he led up to Miss Maitland's portrait. Ling Hop had been cook on a yacht, when an artistic friend of Pelgram's and a parasite of the yacht's owner had discovered one day that the guardian of the galley was a fair draughtsman with some little imagination; and much to his own surprise the Oriental had been snatched from the cook stove and thrust into the artistic arena. It was lucky for him that his scene was set in Boston, which is always sympathetically on edge to embrace exotic genius. In a society delicately attuned to intellectual harmonies from all sources, however strange or weird, the success of a Chinaman possessing the slightest facility with the brush was assured from the first. His industrious compatriots in the local laundries, themselves more impassionate critics, doubtless regarded Ling Hop as an impudent charlatan; but Boston in its most restricted and exclusive sense looked at his work with interest and respect, though sadly without humor. The guest stood silently before the portrait, scanning it earnestly, almost with anxiety, blinking his almond eyes behind his shell-rimmed glasses. As, however, he did not know enough about the technique of painting to offer a sensible appreciation, he wisely confined himself to a very few vaguely eulogistic monosyllables, which seemed greatly to gratify the artist.
"Ah," said Ling Hop, "delicate—delicate!" the adjective being pronounced with a haunting repetition of its most melodious letter. Years of more or less familiarity with the English language had not been able to efface his racial penchant for the labial. One might naturally suppose that to compress a native alphabet of some one hundred and twenty-six letters into one of twenty-six would result in much confusion and some inexplicable preferences, but no one has ever been able to point out why the functions of the extra hundred should have to be assumed by the letter "l" alone.
But to Pelgram the vague liquid sound fell dulcetly on the ear, and by Miss Long and Miss Heatherton no flaw in this art criticism could be discerned. And the artist, glancing about him, saw with gratification that, in addition to the two young ladies, there had by some vague current of motion been swept into his immediate vicinity human flotsam to the extent of perhaps half a dozen irresponsible souls, ignorant that their immediate fate was to be not guests, but auditors.
"Do you feel that? I strove for it," he said in a clear, penetrating voice, calculated to attract the attention, if not the interest, of those even outside the charmed though widening circle. "I strove for just that, feeling that here, above all, it was the one desideratum. At times I feared—" he turned to the impassive Mongolian a puckered forehead—"that I might be sacrificing somewhat of the virile. But no! I said—surely I can sacrifice all things, all considerations, save one."
"You were right," said Ling Hop, cryptically, feeling that he was called upon to say something, but still with that faint adumbration of the inevitable letter.