Phases of an Inferior Planet. Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
you don't like just mere – mere women?" she asked, gravely.
"Are you a mere – mere woman?"
"Yes."
"Then I like them."
The radiance that overflowed her eyes startled him.
"But you aren't just a mere – mere man," she volunteered.
"But I am – a good deal merer, in fact, than many others. I am a shape of clay."
"Then I like shapes of clay," said Mariana.
For an instant they looked at each other in silence. In Mariana's self-conscious eyes there was a soft suffusion of shyness; in his subjective ones there was the quickening of an involuntary interest.
"Then we agree most amicably," he remarked, quietly. As she rose he stood facing her. "It is time for your sleep and my work," he added, and held out his hand.
As Mariana placed her own within it she flashed whitely with a sudden resentment of his cool dismissal.
"Good-night!" she said.
He looked down at her as she lingered before him. "I want to be of use to you," he said, frankly, "but things have an unfortunate way of slipping my memory. If at any time I can serve you, just come to the fire-escape and call me."
"No," answered the girl, pettishly, "certainly not."
His brow wrinkled. "That was rude, I know," he rejoined, "but I meant it honestly."
"I have no doubt of it."
As she turned to go he detained her with a compelling touch.
"You aren't angry?"
"No."
"And you forgive me?"
"I have nothing to forgive. Indeed, I am grateful for your charity."
He surveyed her in puzzled scrutiny. "Well, I am sure I sha'n't forget you," he said. "Yes, I am quite sure of it."
"What a marvellous memory!" exclaimed Mariana, crossly, and she stepped out upon the fire-escape.
"Good-night!" he called.
"Good-night!" she responded, and entered her room.
"He is very rude," she whispered as she closed the shutters. In the half-light she undressed and sat in her night-gown, brushing the heavy tangles of her hair. Then she lighted the flame before the little altar and said her prayers; kneeling with bowed head. As she turned off the light she spoke again. "I am not sure that I don't like rudeness," she added.
Meanwhile Algarcife had watched her vanish into the shadows, a smile lightening the gravity of his face. When she had disappeared he turned to his desk. With his singular powers of concentration, he had not taken up his pen before all impressions save those relating to the subject in hand had been banished from his mind. His expression was buoyant and alert. Turning over his papers, he passed with a sense of reinvigoration to the matter before him.
"Yes; I think, after all, that a strongly modified theory of pangenesis may survive," he said.
CHAPTER VI
At the extreme end of the corridor upon which Mariana's door opened there was a small apartment occupied by three young women from the South, who were bent upon aims of art.
They had moved in a month before, and had celebrated a room-warming by asking Mariana and several of the other lodgers to a feast of beer and pretzels. Since then the girl had seen them occasionally. She knew that they lived in a semi-poverty-stricken Bohemia, and that the pretty one with pink cheeks and a ragged and uncurled fringe of hair, whose name was Freighley, worked in Mr. Nevins's studio and did chrysanthemums in oils. She had once heard Mr. Nevins remark that she was a pupil worth having, and upon asking, "Has she talent?" had met with, "Not a bit, but she's pretty."
"Then it is a pity she isn't a model," said Mariana.
"An example of the eternal contrariness of things," responded Mr. Nevins. "All the good-looking ones want to paint and all the ugly ones want to be painted." Then he rumpled his flaxen head. "In this confounded century everything is in the wrong place, from a woman to her waist-line."
After this Mariana accompanied Miss Freighley on students' day to the Metropolitan Museum, and watched her make a laborious copy of "The Christian Martyr." Upon returning she was introduced to Miss Hill and Miss Oliver, who shared the apartment, and was told to make herself at home.
Then, one rainy Saturday afternoon there was a knock at her door, and, opening it, she found Miss Freighley upon the outside.
"It is our mending afternoon," she said, "and we want you to come and sit with us. If you have any sewing to do, just bring it."
Mariana picked up her work-basket, and, finding that her thimble was missing, began rummaging in a bureau-drawer.
"I never mend anything until I go to put it on," she said. "It saves so much trouble."
Then she found her thimble and followed Miss Freighley into the hall.
Miss Freighley laughed in a pretty, inconsequential way. She had a soft, monotonous voice, and spoke with a marked elimination of vowel sounds.
"We take the last Saturday of the month," she said. "Only Juliet and I do Gerty's things, because she can't sew, and she cleans our palettes and brushes in return."
She swung open the door of the apartment, and they entered a room which served as studio and general lounging-room in one.
A tall girl, sitting upon the hearth-rug beside a heap of freshly laundered garments, stood up and held out a limp, thin hand.
"I told Carrie she would find you," she said, speaking with a slight drawl and an affected listlessness.
She was angular, with a consumptive chest and narrow shoulders. She wore her hair – which was vivid, like flame, with golden ripples in the undulations – coiled confusedly upon the crown of her head. Her name was Juliet Hill. A mistaken but well-known colorist had once traced in her a likeness to Rossetti's "Beata Beatrix." The tracing had resulted in the spoiling of a woman without the making of an artist.
Mariana threw herself upon a divan near the hearth-rug and looked down upon the pile of clothes.
"What a lot of them!" she observed, sympathetically.
Miss Hill drew a stocking from the heap and ran her darning-egg into the heel to locate a hole.
"It is, rather," she responded, "but we never mend until everything we have is in rags. I couldn't find a single pair of stockings this morning, so I knew it was time."
"If you had looked into Gerty's bureau-drawer you might have found them," said Miss Freighley, seating herself upon the end of the divan. "Gerty never marks her things, and somehow she gets all of ours. Regularly once a month I institute a search through her belongings, and discover more of my clothes than I knew I possessed. Here, give me that night-gown, Juliet. The laundress tore every bit of lace off the sleeve. What a shame!"
Mariana removed a guitar from the couch and leaned back among the pillows, glancing about the room. The walls were covered with coarse hangings, decorated in vague outlines of flying cranes and vaguer rushes. Here and there were tacked groups of unframed water-colors and drawings in charcoal – all crude and fanciful and feminine. Upon a small shelf above the door stood a plaster bust, and upon it a dejected and moth-eaten raven – the relic of a past passion for taxidermy. In the centre of the room were several easels, a desk, with Webster's Unabridged for a foot-stool, and a collection of palettes, half-used tubes of paint, and unassorted legs and arms in plaster.
"How do you ever find anything?" asked Mariana, leaning upon her arm.
"We don't," responded a small, dark girl, coming from the tiny kitchen with a dish of cooling caramels in her hand; "we don't find, we just lose." She placed the dish upon the table and drew up a chair. "I would mortgage a share of my life if I could turn my old mammy loose in here for an hour."
"Gerty used to be particular," explained Miss Freighley; "but it is a vicious habit, and we broke her of it. Even now it attacks her at intervals,