“In the first place, I am fortunate enough not to find you out, and, secondly, I don’t happen to be in New York; I just live here, as I have done any time these past three years. But I didn’t know that you did until I met old Oliver, who gave me your address. I didn’t know whether it was your place of business or your dwelling; but I came on the chance of finding you.”
“And I don’t think you appreciate yet that it is both,” she said, an amused expression on her face, as she saw him glance around the room.
“Do you really live here, too?” he asked. The evidence of the studio was there, but none of the delicate and dainty traces of a feminine bedchamber.
“Indeed I do, and when it comes ‘by-low’ time, there is a grand transformation scene,” she answered, laughing; and, although he joined in her laughter, there was sadness in his heart as he realized the import of the meager accommodations.
“I don’t see a kitchen, at any rate, so I suppose there is no reason why you can’t come out to dinner with me this evening,” he said.
“Nothing but your presence, which prevents me from changing my gown,” she replied, doubtfully. “You can choose between walking the streets and sitting on the stairs outside while I get ready.”
“Don’t make it as long a proceeding as in the old days, then,” he said, as he stood by the table and carelessly turned over the sketches, and she smiled a little bitterly as she promised to hurry, realizing how little she had to select from as compared to the days when the choice from many gowns demanded due consideration. A flood of recollections came to her as she made her hasty toilet, and she appreciated, from the cheer and life which Tom Livingston’s brief presence had brought into the studio, how terribly lonely her life had been for the past few months. Before that there had been the companionship of her fellow students in the art school, many of the women struggling along like herself, living on the bare necessities of life and oftentimes knowing what it meant to lack for them, but stimulated and kept at their work by the hope of ultimate success in their painting.
The small glass told her that her face was still very attractive, although it had lost much of the girlish prettiness it possessed in the days when Tom had known and loved her; but then—thank Heaven!—she had never cared for such things, and all she wanted was success in her chosen profession, the one thing which she loved in life.
And Tom, on the other side of the door, was also thinking of her career and the visible results of her work since he had seen her; the small, cheap studio in the dilapidated old house and the lack of comfort in her mode of living, and he contrasted it with the home he had known her in and the things he could have surrounded her with, had she accepted his offer when the crash came which threw her on her own resources. She had elected to remain independent, to devote what little money had been saved from the wreck of her fortunes to pursuing her studies in painting; encouraged in her decision by the praise which her amateurish efforts had gained from sympathetic friends. But while the studies of the daughter of John Thornton, one of the most influential men of the city where they lived, might be praised by the good-natured reporters of the home papers at local exhibitions, the works of Elizabeth Thornton, of whose parentage and social position the critics neither knew nor cared, were judged on their merits when she asked that they be taken seriously, and they were found sadly wanting.
Tom could imagine the girl’s latter history from what he knew of the artists’ colony in New York; the years in the art school, where she had worked hard and no one had been sufficiently ill-natured or had cared enough for her to tell her to give it up, and then the misguided judgment which had led her to take a studio for herself. He had tactfully said nothing when he had looked over the sketches; but he knew that they were bad, and his sharp eyes had not missed the traces of tears on her face; so he easily made two, by the old process of putting one and one together, and formed a pretty accurate guess as to what had happened.