That habit, to judge by its chosen surroundings, was a very ascetic one; as different from her own as possibly could be imagined. This was a workroom pure and simple. Not an attempt had been made, it would seem, to redeem its humble, commonplace ugliness. Abraham, in coloured worsteds, complacently sacrificed Isaac, over the mantelpiece; Mrs. Elles would have covered the pair with an art rug of some sort. The frosted-sugar top of Mrs. Watson’s wedding cake stood on the console; Mrs. Elles would, regardless of offence to the poor old lady, have requested her to remove it. Every other available table and cornice was heaped and piled with sketch books; easels and bulging umbrellas filled up all the four corners. There was a little stack of books on the mantelshelf, but not a single work of fiction was to be discerned among them. There was Shelley—just the watery, bloodless, spiritually intense poet that she would expect Rivers to appreciate. There were some flowers in a little china dog on the side table, garden flowers, phloxes and stocks, but these Mrs. Elles rightly attributed to the solicitude of the landlady’s niece. The whole room was intensely significant to her of those qualities, which, with her trick of hasty generalization, she now chose to attribute to this man,—modesty, endurance, and self-abnegation, and a whole-souled devotion to his art and the purposes of his art.
There was the old-fashioned, silk-fluted piano on one side of the room, to which he had alluded, and she paused, with her hand on the curved lid.
“Oh, that has stood there ever since I first came here,” the artist said; “I have never dared to open it. Jane Anne plays on it in the winter, I believe. This house, from its neighbourhood to the park, is so damp that I am sure that no piano could endure it and live. That is the worst of all embowering trees! Have you noticed that one’s notepaper becomes like blotting paper?”
How should she notice, who had no notepaper of her own, and wrote no letters? She opened the instrument and played a bar or two.
“Quite tolerable!” she pronounced.
He quietly put a chair in front of it, without saying anything, and she sat down and played a bit of her favourite Chopin.
He thanked her, not very warmly.
“Don’t you like Chopin?”
“He does me no good. Too restless! What is the use of setting all one’s nerves in an uproar, as he does, and giving one no solution? I confess that I like music that resolves me. Beethoven, for instance.”
“Oh, Beethoven resolves you, does he?” She hardly knew what Rivers meant, but she knew that she did not care for Beethoven. “What a pity I don’t know any of him! Is he—” she hesitated; she was becoming shy of airing her tentative little theories to this man whose culture, as she apprehended, had its roots in tradition, in a knowledge far deeper than she could claim for her own, mere “self-made” woman that she was—“is he the landscape painter’s musician, as Shelley is his poet?”