Very neatly, Cornelia spread a napkin for a cloth on the table and placed down the tray and proceeded to eat her breakfast. She took a slice of bread and butter and an egg, and two strong cups of black coffee. She loved coffee. It was her one real vice. Lately she had needed it more than ever. Night gave her no rest: and coffee weakened the pall of morning.
She cleared away her dishes.
There was her work before her and it was time to be working.
She looked at the little huddle of clay on the level of her head. She unwound the clinging cloth. She knew that she was bored. It was nothing but a huddle of dull clay. In it was lost somewhere the head of a boy. It was her task to find him, to bring him out, so she could go on when her model came. She found she did not care. The clay and the boy’s head were remote. With all her effort, she could not bring them nearer. She looked at her work as if it had been the work of another person, very dim and weak, and very far away. She saw that it was hopelessly bad. She saw that Tom was right. He did not take her Art with any seriousness. That did not matter. Plenty of people did. She had won prizes. She was on Committees of Exhibition. Last year the Metropolitan Museum had bought her Dawn. But all of this was wrong. She did not care. She knew! She knew her Art was worthless. Because it bored her. It was a task. Ever since she had had time to give herself to it, it had not deceived her. Ever since she was an artist she had known she was no artist at all. David never spoke of her work. It meant nothing to him. He said he did not understand such matters. Nonsense! She remembered his childish outburst of joy at a Chinese vase they had seen one day in a shop-window on Fifth Avenue. What did he know of Chinese vases? Yet he had loved it. Had he once captured such a moment from her casts, it had perhaps been different.
How strange it all was, what an ironic time of it the world was having with its men and women! She had yearned to escape in order to be an artist. She had left home, risked life. She and Tom slaved, at one time nearly starved, while she pursued her dream. Here she was: Cornelia Rennard, Sculptress. And ashes in her hand. But what was more than strange: she did not seem to care. It all seemed natural enough. Like a tale whose end she knew and whose telling bored her.
Tom was right....
She found she had unconsciously redraped the wet rag around her model. She thought of David. The resolve: the resolve! How dimly she reacted to life this morning! Not alone this morning. She had never thought even of looking out of the window. Look! it was snowing. She leaned against the window-seat. The snow came swirling, merry, through blue air. There was little wind. The street was muffled and passive: strangely quiet street under the merry snow.
David might have come. Did he hate her? she wondered. She was importunate, cloying perhaps. Young blood hates such a woman. Almost she blamed herself for the fact that her nights were streaked with yearning for him.
“But he does not know. He does not know. I have not bothered him really....” She pleaded with him. Let her have at least her nights of broken dreams, her days broken with worry.
She had definitely given up her modeling for the day, she had a sense of relief.