Part 13

"Notice that bit of impertinent detail, the unnecessary jewel?" he queried, stabbing with his pipe-stem at one of Atwood's drawings which a premature Christmas magazine had reproduced in color. "Craig never did it."

"Then who did?" Jean asked.

"His sister."

"Does she draw?"

"By proxy. I mean she suggested this as she has suggested every false, vitiating note that's crept into his work. Left to himself, Craig never paints the lily. But he defers to her as a younger brother often will to a sister who has mothered or stepmothered him. It was probably a good thing once--I admit she has brains and push; but now it's time the coddling stopped. It did let up for a while when she went over to the Dutch--she was too busy to bother with him; but with her husband underground and Craig coming on, it has begun again. Artistically she's his evil genius. Of course he can't see it, or won't. I've done my level best to beat it into him."

"You have told him!"

"Certainly; and her too. I have known them both for years. What are you grinning at?"

"Your candor. What did he say?"

MacGregor scowled.

"Same old rot I'm always hearing," he grumbled. "Called me a woman-hater. What do you think?" challenging her abruptly. "You've seen me at close quarters for some time. Do I strike you as that sort of man? I want your unvarnished opinion."

Jean answered him with his own frankness.

"A woman-hater?" she repeated. "Never. I think you are"--she searched for the word--"a woman-idolater."

MacGregor grimly assured himself that no sarcasm was intended.

"Expound," he directed.

"I mean it seems to me you rate Woman so high that mere women can't realize your ideal."

"Humph!" he commented ungraciously. "Where did you learn to turn cheap epigrams? Probably it's an echo of something you've read."

He addressed her variously as Miss Epigrams, Lady Blessington, and Madame de Staël as the work went forward, always with profound gravity, until finally, when he saw her color rise to his teasing, he gave his full-lunged laugh and confessed.

"All the same, you're right, Miss Epigrams. That's one reason why I'm still unattached. It's also why I haven't cared to see Craig take the only sure cure. A wife would teach his sister her place, if she had the right metal." He chuckled at the vision his words conjured. "But it would be a battle royal."

It was spring before Jean herself saw Mrs. Van Ostade. She had posed for Atwood frequently after Christmas, but had chanced always to be either with MacGregor or Richter when his sister visited the studio, until the April afternoon when Julie's knock interrupted an overdue illustration which Atwood was toiling mightily to finish. He frowned at the summons and answered it without putting down the maul-stick, palette, and brushes with which his hands were cumbered; but his "You, Julie!" at the door hinted no impatience, nor his returning step aught but infinite leisure as he issued with his dark-eyed, dark-haired, dark-skinned caller from behind the screen.

"Those stairs!" sighed the lady. Then, observing Jean, she subjected her to a drastic ordeal by lorgnon, which, raking her from face to gown,--where the inquisition lingered,--returned with added intensity upon her face.

Hot plowshares could have been no more fiery for poor Jean, who, sufficiently aglow with the knowledge that the dress upon her back was a piece of Mrs. Van Ostade's evening finery abandoned to the uses of the studio, found herself tormented by the certainty that somewhere in her vulnerable past she and this sister of Craig Atwood's had met before.

A sympathetic reflection of her embarrassment lit the man's face.

"This is Miss Fanshaw," he interposed, "herself an artist. You have heard me speak of her, Julie."

The lorgnon dropped and the two women exchanged a bow perceptible to the naked eye.

"I know the face," stated Mrs. Van Ostade, with an impersonal air of classifying scientific phenomena. "Where did I see it?"

Jean now recalled this elusive detail most vividly, but she kept her head.

"Probably in Mr. Atwood's work," she suggested coldly.

"Of course," seconded Atwood, keen to end the incident. "You will find Miss Fanshaw in half my recent stuff."

"The living face has no pictorial associations whatever," retorted his sister, with decision. "I shall remember in time. But go on with your work, Craig. I did not come to disturb you--merely to bring a piece of news which I'll tell you as soon as I get my breath."

Atwood placed a chair and, returning to his easel, made a show of work which Jean's trained eye knew for his usual polite pretense with visitors who assumed themselves no hindrance; while Mrs. Van Ostade, throwing back her furs, relegated the model to the ranks of the inanimate studio properties, of which her leisured survey now took stock.

"Those stairs!" she said again, pursuing her breath by the unique method of lavishing more. "Really, Craig, you couldn't have pitched on a more inconvenient rookery."

"We thought it a miracle for the money once," he reminded. "I dare say I could find a more convenient workshop in one of the new office-buildings, but then I shouldn't have my open fire."

"You could have it at the Copley Studios, and modern comforts, too."

"Up there!" he scoffed. "I don't belong in the pink-tea circle, Julie."

Mrs. Van Ostade refused to smile with him.

"The location counts," she insisted.

"With some people."

"With the helpful people. I've thought it over carefully; I've used my eyes and ears. The studio unquestionably carries weight. It ought to be something more than a workshop, as you call it. It should have atmosphere. Even our friend down the street has achieved that. Barbaric as it is, MacGregor's studio has a distinct artistic unity."

"Mac's place reflects his work. So does mine."

"Yours! It's a jumble of everything, a junk-shop."

"Of course it is," he laughed. "I've ransacked two-thirds of these treasures from the Ghetto. But even junk-shops have atmosphere--a musty one--and so, it logically follows, must my studio."

She indulged his trifling with a divine patience.

"Could you receive Mrs. Joyce-Reeves in such a place?" she queried sweetly.

"Certainly; if any possible errand could bring that high and mighty personage over the door-sill."

"There is a possible reason."

Her tone drew him round. Jean, forgotten by both, discerned that he also attached a significance to the hypothetical visit. She was at a loss to account for this, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves's prominence in the social world of New York notwithstanding.

"Is this your news, Julie?" he demanded.

His sister savored his quickened interest a moment.

"Part of it," she replied. "She saw your dry-point of me at Mrs. Quentin Van Ostade's the other day."

"The dry-point!" he deprecated. "It was only an experiment."

"So I told her. She asked if you do anything in the way of portraiture in oil, and of course I answered yes."

"I say!"

"Well, haven't you?"

"Trash, yes; cart-loads of it."

"Perhaps you call your portrait of Malcolm MacGregor trash? Mrs. Joyce-Reeves did not."

"She saw it!"

"I dropped casually that it had been hung with the Fifth Avenue exhibition of MacGregor's African studies, and she took the address. That was day before yesterday. This afternoon I met her again--met her leaving the gallery."

"Well?" jogged Atwood, impatiently.

"She told me she had bought two of MacGregor's things," continued Mrs. Van Ostade, not to be hurried. "She took a desert nocturne and that queer veiled woman at a window--you remember?"

"Do I!" He spun about. "You heard that, Jean? Mrs. Joyce-Reeves has bought 'The Lattice'! Miss Fanshaw posed for it, Julie."

"Indeed!" The lorgnon, again unsheathed at the intimate "Jean," once more took cognizance of that young person's existence. "I don't care for it. But, what is more important, Mrs. Joyce-Reeves mentioned your portrait."

"Yes?"

"And this time asked for your address."

"Jove! You think--"

"I'm positive she'll give you a commission."

"Jove!" he exclaimed again, "what a chance!" and paced the studio. "Yet she may. It's her whim to pose as a discoverer. What a chance! What a colossal chance! It would mean--what wouldn't it mean?" He stopped excitedly before the escritoire where Jean sat waiting to resume her interrupted impersonation of a note-writing débutante. "It would take nerve, no end of it. She's been painted by Sargent, Chartran, Zorn--all the big guns. A fellow would have to find a phase they'd missed. But if he could! You can't conceive her influence, Jean. If she buys a man's pictures, all the little fish in her pond tumble over one another to buy them, too. That's not the main issue, however, though I don't blink its importance. The opportunity to paint _her_, to search out the woman behind--that's the big thing. I have a theory. I met her once--she'd bought an original of mine, thanks again to Julie--and something she let fall makes me think--but I'm talking as if I had the commission in my hands."

Jean scarcely heard. Sympathize with him as she might, Julie Van Ostade's face, from the moment Atwood's talk ceased to be hers exclusively, absorbed her more.

"Craig," broke in his sister, crisply, "my furs."

He touched earth blankly.

"Not going, Julie?"

"My furs," she repeated.

"But I haven't begun to thank you," he said, obeying.

"Is not that also premature?" She rustled majestically toward the door, which he sprang before her to open. The girl was but a lay figure in her path.

Then the door closed and Atwood, wearing a look of bewilderment, came slowly up the studio to meet still another problem in feminine psychology in the now thoroughly outraged Jean.

"Why did you introduce me?" she demanded bitterly. "Why couldn't you let me remain a common model to her? I am a common model in her eyes--common in every sense. I remember well enough where she saw me, and she'll remember, too, never fear."

"Jean! Jean!" He came to her in distress.

"It was a drinking-place, and the girl with me had drunk too much. We amused your sister's theater-party immensely. They were probably slumming--seeing low life!"

He drew a calmer account from her presently.

"I know the place," he said. "It had rather a vogue before people found out that it was only sham-German, after all. It's a perfectly respectable rathskeller. You went with some gentleman, of course?"

Jean's passion for confession flagged.

"With a friend of Amy's from the boarding-house," she answered briefly.

Atwood gave a relieved laugh.

"You have made a mountain of a mole-hill," he told her; "but I'm glad you mentioned the circumstances. I'll explain to Julie, if she ever thinks of it again. Don't misjudge her, Jean. I admit she's unsympathetic at first sight, even brusque; but there's another side, believe me. You saw how devoted she is to my interests."

She had indeed seen, and the knowledge rankled.

"You should not have introduced me, made me share your talk," she said. "You meant a kindness, but it was no kindness; it was a humiliation, a--" Then the tension snapped and her head went down between her arms.

"Kindness!" He swept her stormily to himself. "Kindness, Jean! Can't you see why I wanted you to share it with me? Can't you see that I want you to share everything? I love you, Jean."

For a long moment she yielded; the next she had slipped from him and the escritoire was between them.

"Don't," she forbade. "You must not say these things to me."

"Must not?"

"I can't marry you."

"Can't! Yet a moment ago--"

"I can't marry you," she repeated breathlessly.

"But your kiss--"

"Was a lie--pity--what you like. I was unstrung. I--I don't love you."

He searched her face for a perplexed instant.

"Jean," he commanded; "look at me!"

She faced him.

"Now tell me that again--straight in the eyes."

"Don't," she entreated.

"Say it!"

"You heard me."

"I want to hear it again--on your honor!" He waited.

"I--I refuse."

He strode toward her in triumph.

"You can't," he cried. "The kiss was no lie. It was the truth, the sacred truth! What unselfish madness made you try to deceive me?"

"Remember your career," she protested; "your sister's world, which is your world, too."

But the time for reasoning was past.

XXII

What passed forthwith between brother and sister Jean neither heard nor particularly conjectured. Ways, means, and motives were for the time being eclipsed by the tremendous fact that Julie called. That she acquitted herself of this formality at an hour when the slightest possible knowledge of the girl's habits would argue her absence from Irving Place, roused in Jean only a vast relief. The mute pasteboard was itself sufficiently formidable.

She was even more relieved that through some mischance, for which Atwood, who went with her, taxed himself, her return call found Julie out. Visiting-cards she had none, their urgent need having hitherto never presented itself; but Atwood helped her pretend before the rather overpowering servant that she had forgotten them, and, scribbling her name upon one of his own, bore her off for an evening at the play.

Here, for the space of a week, matters rested, only to hatch a fresh embarrassment in the end, beside which calls were trivialities. This was no less than an invitation to dine, and to dine, not with Mrs. Van Ostade and Atwood merely, but as one of a more or less formal company--so Craig enlightened her--of the clever or socially significant.

Jean heard these depressing explanations with a sick face.

"I can't go," she protested quickly. "Don't ask me."

"Can't!" he repeated. "Why not?"

"You know why. They're different, these people--as different from me as if I were Chinese."

"What rubbish!"

"It's the truth. Perhaps later, when I've studied more, seen more, I can meet them and not shame you--"

"Shame me, Jean! If you realized how proud I am--"

"Then don't put me in a position where you may feel anything but proud. Don't make me go."

He reasoned with her laughingly, but without real understanding of her reluctance.

"Besides," he concluded, "you can't decline. The dinner is really for you."

Her cup of misery brimmed over.

"For me!"

"In a way, it's in honor of our engagement, even though it isn't known."

"Your sister wrote nothing of this."

"But she told me. She said she wanted you to meet some of our friends. Don't be afraid of them, Jean. You're as clever as any of them, while in looks not a woman Julie knows can hold a candle to you."

"But their clothes! Don't you see it's impossible? I've absolutely nothing to wear."

The man flicked this thistle-down airily away.

"Dowds, half of 'em, Julie's crowd," he declared. "You don't need anything elaborate. Just wear some simple gown that doesn't hide your neck. Simple things tell."

"And cost," she added, smiling ruefully at his nebulous solution. "I have never owned a dinner-gown in my life."

Atwood had an inspiration.

"Why, the studio is full of them," he cried.

"Your sister's--every one. Could I wear one of her dresses to her dinner?"

"Hardly. What inferior intellects men have! But is there any objection to your wearing one of _my_ gowns? None of the properties fit the scheme of illustrations I've planned for that last novel, and I've decided to have one or two things made. Now, if you'll choose the material and bother with the fittings--"

Jean's laugh riddled this improvisation.

"I'll go if I must," she promised, "but I'll wear my own clothes. After all, I know something about dressmaking."

Nevertheless, the dress problem was serious when she came to marshal her resources, and she still vacillated in a choice of evils, when Amy happened in with a fresh point of view and an authoritative knowledge of the latest mode, which cleared the muddle magically.

"Put those away," she ordered, dismissing with a glance the alternatives arrayed despairingly on the bed. "Wear white or a color, and you'll have every old cat there rubbering to see how it's made. Where's your black net?"

"Here," said Jean, producing it without enthusiasm. "It's hopeless."

"It is a sight by daylight," agreed Amy, candidly. "That cheap quality always gets brown and rusty. But under gas it will never show. Cut those sleeves off at the elbow and edge them with lace. The forty-nine-cent kind will do, and you'll only need two yards."

Jean's spirits rebounded under this practical encouragement.

"I might turn in the neck about so much," she suggested, indicating an angle by no means extravagant.

Amy snatched the garment away.

"Scissors!" she commanded decisively. "This yoke is coming out altogether. Can't you see, Jean Fanshaw, that if you give your shoulders a chance, people won't think twice about your dress? I'd just give millions for your shoulders. The black will set them off as nothing else could. If you want a dash of color, I don't know anything smarter than a spray of pink-satin roses. Fred thinks I twist them up almost like real."

Jean evaded the artificial flowers with tact, but otherwise let herself be guided by Amy, under whose fingers the transformation of the black net went forward rapidly.

"It's a treat to have something to do," Amy avowed, declining aid. "I get awful lonesome over at our boarding-place. You never have time any more to run in, and, excepting Saturday afternoon and Sunday, I don't see anything of Fred. This is his busiest time, he says. Fred's a crackerjack salesman. Last month he sent in more orders than any man the firm ever put on the road. He just seems to hypnotize customers, same as he did me. I know you would like him, too, Jean, if you would ever come over while he's home. He spoke about that very thing the other day. He said it looked as if you were trying to dodge him. He wanted me to ask you to go down to the Coney Island opening last Saturday, but I was afraid you'd say no and hurt his feelings, so I told him you were sure to be at your art school. I was glad afterward you didn't come, for we met Stella Wilkes."

The name failed to stir Jean as of old.

"I don't fear Stella now," she said.

"I do," Amy rejoined. "It gives me the creeps to be anywhere near her. Fred says he can't see why. Men are queer that way. She came up to us on the Iron Pier, where we were having beer and sandwiches, and in spite of all my hints, he asked her to have something, too. She told us she was singing in one of the music-halls down there, and nothing would do Fred but we must go that night and see what her voice was like. She spotted us down in the crowd and waved her hand at us as bold as you please. I was so mad! Fred didn't care. He thought she had a bully voice. It did sound first-rate in 'coon songs,' and I really had to laugh myself at some of her antics when she danced a cake-walk. Wouldn't it be a queer thing if she got to be well known? Fred says there's no reason why she shouldn't earn big money, and he's a dandy judge of acting. You ought to hear him spout some of the speeches from 'Monte Cristo.' We always go to a show Saturday nights, when he's home, and generally Sundays to sacred concerts and actors' benefits. I wouldn't go Sundays if the rest of the week wasn't so dull. If I only had a flat, it would help pass the time away. I tease Fred for one all the time. Maybe I can pretty soon. He's to have Long Island and North Jersey for his territory, and that will bring him home oftener nights. Haven't you a better drop-skirt than this?"

"Drop-skirt?" The transition caught Jean daydreaming over a contrast between Amy's drummer and an illustrator not unknown to fame.

"This one is so scant it spoils the whole dress," explained the critic. "I always said so."

"I know; but it's the best I have. Does it matter so much?"

"Matter!" Amy mourned over the offending detail with artistic concern. "There's nothing I'm so particular about. A drop-skirt like this would spoil a Paquin gown, or a Redfern, let alone a--a--"

"Rusty black net?" Jean prompted. "Aren't you forgetting my wonderful shoulders? Nobody is to look at anything else, you know!"

Amy ignored the implication.

"It won't be so funny if they do," she reproved. "I do wish I had something to lend you, but since I left the store, I never wear black. Fred likes lively colors. Isn't there anything at the studio you could borrow?"

There was, though Jean forbore to mention it. As certain as her need, was the knowledge that from the third right-hand hook of the studio wardrobe depended its easy satisfaction. She had told Atwood with almost rebuking emphasis that she must wear her own clothes, but in the befogging nervousness which the bugaboo of the dinner wrought, the temptation to make use of at least this discarded trifle of Mrs. Van Ostade's plenty assailed her with waxing strength, till success or failure seemed to hang on her decision. The garment had its individuality, like most things belonging to Julie, who, Atwood said, had her own notions of design; but Jean told herself that it need not be flaunted.

To assure herself whether, after all, she might not be overrating its importance, she wore the silken lure home under her street-dress the evening of the dinner. This candid course was most efficacious. In the light of the miracle it worked, consistency troubled her no more than Amy. Its influence transcended the material; it fortified her courage; and when at last the admiring maid brought word that a gentleman waited below, she gave a final glance mirrorward, which was almost optimistic, and went down for Craig's verdict with starry eyes.

No faintest premonition prepared her to confront in the dim-lit room, not Craig, but Paul.

The dentist took an uncertain step toward her.

"I had to come, Jean," he said defensively. "There hasn't been a more miserable cuss in the city. I--" Then, seeing her clearly under the flare of the gas-burner nearest the door, which her hand sought instantly, he stood a moment, wide-eyed and mute, in fascinated survey of her unwonted garb. No tribute to its effectiveness could be more sincere. As if it spoke for her like a symbol, answering a question he could no longer put, he made a simple gesture of renunciation, the pathos and dignity of which sounded the very well-springs of her pity. "Excuse me for butting in," he added. "I can see now it was no use."

Jean put out her hand. The mystery of her dead affection--she could not call it love--for this man was never more baffling. The woman she was seemed as far removed from her who pledged herself to Paul, as that girl in turn was remote from the mutinous rebel of Cottage No. 6; but the dentist's gesture, his words, his shabbiness--so different from the half-dandified neatness of old--touched her where a direct appeal to their common past would have found her flint.

"It was no use in the way you mean, Paul," she said gently. "But sit down. I am sorry if you have been unhappy."

Whereupon an inconceivably subdued Paul Bartlett sat down beside her and with a gush of mingled self-pity and remorse poured the tale of his manifold sorrows into an absorbed and--her wrongs, her sex considered--sympathetic ear. Life had fared ill with the dentist. He had not been able, he said, to swing the enterprise of the new office quite as he had hoped. The location was all right, the equipment was all right, but for some reason, perhaps the election-time flurry, perhaps because he himself may not have pushed things as he did when feeling quite up to par, patients had not flocked his way. The hell he had been through! To know there wasn't a more up-to-date office in Harlem, not one that paid a stiffer rent, and yet, for a month, six weeks, two months, to see almost nobody drift in except "shoppers"--Jean would remember their sort!--who haggled over dinkey little jobs such as amalgam fillings, or beat him down on a cheap plate to a figure that hardly paid a man to fire up his vulcanizer--well, he'd sooner handle a pick and shovel than go through that again.

"But it's better now?" she asked.