A Daughter of To-Day. Sara Jeannette Duncan
was undeniably caught. As a drawing it was incorrect enough, but its charm lay in a subtle spiritual something that bad worked into it from the girl's own fingers, and made the beautiful empty classic face modernly interesting. In view of its inaccuracy the committee had been guilty of a most irregular proceeding in recognizing it with a medal; but in a very young art school this might be condoned.
"It's a perfectly lovely thing," interposed Mrs. Bell from the sofa. "I'm sure it deserves one."
Elfrida said nothing. The study was ticketed, it had obviously won a medal.
Mr. Bell looked at it critically. "Yes, it's certainly well done. In spite of the frame—I wouldn't give ten cents for the frame—the effect is fine. We most find a good light for that. Oh, now we come to the oil-paintings. We both presumed you would do well at the oil-paintings; and for my part," continued Mr. Bell definitely, "I like them best. There's more variety in them." He was holding at arm's-length, as he spoke, an oblong scrap of filmy blue sky and marshy green fields in a preposterously wide, flat, dull gold frame, and looking at it in a puzzled way. Presently he reversed it and looked again.
"No, papa," Elfrida said, "you had it right side up before." She was biting her lip, and struggling with a desire to pile them all back into the box and shut the lid and stamp on it.
"That's exquisite!" murmured Mrs. Bell, when Mr. Bell had righted it again.
"It's one of the worst," said Elfrida briefly. Mr. Bell looked relieved. "Since that's your own opinion, Elfrida," he said, "I don't mind saying that I don't care much about it either. It looks as if you'd got tired of it before you finished it."
"Does it?" Elfrida said.
"Now this is a much better thing, in my opinion," her father went on, standing the picture of an old woman behind an apple-stall along the wall with the rest "I don't pretend to be a judge, but I know what I like, and I like that. It explains itself."
"It's a lovely bit of color," remarked Mrs. Bell.
Elfrida smiled. "Thank you, mamma," she said, and kissed her.
When the box was exhausted, Mr. Bell walked up and down for a few minutes in front of the row against the wall, with his hands in his pockets, reflecting, while Mrs. Bell discovered new beauties to the author of them.
"We'll hang this lot in the dining-room," he said at length, "and those black-and-whites with the oak mountings in the parlor. They'll go best with the wall-paper there."
"Yes, papa."
"And I hope you won't mind, Elfrida," he added, "but I've promised that they shall have one of your paintings to raffle off in the bazar for the alterations in the Sunday-school next week."
"Oh no, papa. I shall be delighted."
Elfrida was sitting beside her mother on the sofa, and at the dose of this proposition Mr. Bell came and sat there too. There was a silence for a moment while they all three confronted the line of pictures leaning against the wall Then Elfrida began to laugh, and she went on laughing, to the astonishment of her parents, until the tears came into her eyes. She stopped as suddenly, kissed her mother and father, and went upstairs. "I'm afraid you've hurt Her feelings, Leslie," said Mrs. Bell, when she had well gone.
But Elfrida's feelings had not been hurt, though one might say that the evening left her sense of humor rather sore. At that moment she was dallying with the temptation to describe the whole scene in a letter to a valued friend in Philadelphia, who would have appreciated it with mirth. In the end she did not write. It would have been too humiliating.
CHAPTER III.
"Pas mal, parbleu!" Lucien remarked, with pursed-out lips, running his fingers through his shock of coarse hair, and reflectively scratching the top of his big head as he stepped closer to Nadie Palicsky's elbow, where she stood at her easel in his crowded atelier. The girl turned and looked keenly into his face, seeking his eyes, which were on her work with a considering, interested look. Satisfied, she sent a glance of joyous triumph at a somewhat older woman, whose place was next, and who was listening with the amiable effacement of countenance that is sometimes a more or less successful disguise for chagrin. On this occasion it seemed to fail, for Mademoiselle Palicsky turned her attention to Lucien and her work again with a slight raising of the eyebrows and a slighter sigh. Her face assumed a gentle melancholy, as if she were pained at the exhibition of a weakness of her sex; yet it was unnecessary to be an acute observer to read there the hope that Lucien's significant phrase had not by any chance escaped her neighbor.
"The drawing of the neck," Lucien went on, "is excellently brutal." Nadie wished he would speak a little louder, but Lucien always arranged the carrying power of his voice according to the susceptibilities of the atelier. He thrust his hands into his pockets and still stood beside her, looking at her study of the nude model who posed upon a table in the midst of the students. "In you, mademoiselle," he added in a tone yet lower, "I find the woman and the artist divorced. That is a vast advantage—an immense source of power. I am growing more certain of you; you are not merely cleverly eccentric as I thought. You have a great deal that no one can teach you. You have finished that—I wish to take it downstairs to show the men. It will not be jeered at, I promise you."
"Cher maitre! You mean it?"
"But certainly!"
The girl handed him the study with a look of almost doglike gratitude in her narrow gray eyes. Lucien had never said so much to her before, though the whole atelier had noticed how often he had been coming to her easel lately, and had disparaged her in corners accordingly. She looked at the tiny silver watch she wore in a leather strap on her left wrist—he had spent nearly five minutes with her this time, watching her work and talking to her, in itself a triumph. It was almost four o'clock, and the winter daylight was going; presently they would all stop work. Partly for the pleasure of being chaffed and envied and complimented in the anteroom in the general washing of brushes, and partly to watch Lucien's rapid progress among the remaining easels, Mademoiselle Palicsky deliberately sat down, in a prematurely vacant chair, slung one slender little limb over the other, and waited. As she sat there a generous thought rose above her exultation. She hoped everybody else in the atelier had guessed what Lucien was saying to her all that while, and had seen him carry off her day's work, but not the little American. The little American, who was at least thirteen inches taller than Mademoiselle Palicsky, was sufficiently discouraged already, and it was pathetic, in view of almost a year of failure, to see how she clung to her ghost of a talent Besides, the little American admired Nadie Palicsky, her friend, her comrade, quite enough already.
Elfrida had heard, nevertheless. She listened eagerly, tensely, as she always did when Lucien opened his lips in her neighborhood. When she saw him take the sketch to show in the men's atelier downstairs, to exhibit to that horde of animals below, whose studies and sketches and compositions were so constantly brought up for the stimulus and instruction of Lucien's women students, she grew suddenly so white that the girl who worked next her, a straw-colored Swede, asked her if she were ill, and offered her a little green bottle of salts of lavender. "It's that beast of a calorifere," the Swede said, nodding at the hideous black cylinder that stood near them, "they will always make it too hot."
Elfrida waved the salts back hastily—Lucien was coming her way. She worked seated, and as he seemed on the point of passing with merely a casual glance and an ambiguous "H'm!" she started up. The movement effectually arrested him, unintentional though it seemed. He frowned slightly, thrusting his hands deep into his coat-pockets, and looked again.
"We must find a better place for you, mademoiselle; you can make nothing of it here so close to the model, and below him thus." He would have gone on, but in spite of his intention to avert his eyes he caught the girl's glance, and something infinitely appealing in it stayed him again. "Mademoiselle," he said, with visible irritation, "there is nothing to say that I have not said many times already. Your drawing is still ladylike, your color is still pretty, and, sapristi!