"Is there a new sculptor?" Helen asked, smiling. "That is wonderful news."
"Yes; we think he is the coming man. His name is Stanton; Orin Stanton."
"Oh," responded Helen, with involuntary frankness in her accent.
Mrs. Frostwinch laughed with perfect good nature.
"You don"t admire him?" she commented. "Well, many don"t. To say the truth, I do not think anybody alive, if you will pardon me, Mrs.
Greyson, knows the truth about sculpture. Perhaps the Greeks did, but we don"t, even when we are told. I know the Soldiers" Monument on the Common is hideous beyond words, because everybody says so; but they didn"t when it was put up. Only a few artists objected then."
"And the fact that a few artists have brought everybody to their opinion," Edith asked, "doesn"t make you feel that they must be right; must have the truth behind them?"
"No; frankly, I can"t say that it does," Mrs. Frostwinch responded.
She leaned back in her chair, a soft flush on her thin, high-bred face.
Her figure, in a beautiful gown of beryl plush embroidered with gold, seemed artistically designed for the carved, high-backed chair in which she sat, and both her companions were too appreciative to lose the grace of the picture she made.
"I cannot see that it is bad," she went on. "Mr. Fenton has proved it to me, and even Mr. Herman, who seems, so far as I have seen him, the most charitable of men, when I asked him how he liked it, spoke with positive loathing of it. I can"t manage to make myself unhappy over it, that"s all. And I believe I am as appreciative as the average."
To Helen there was something at once fascinating and repellent in this talk. She was attracted by Mrs. Frostwinch. The perfect breeding, the grace, the polish of the woman, won upon her strongly, while yet the subtile air of taking life conventionally, of lacking vital earnestness, was utterly at variance with the sculptor"s temperament and methods of thought. She no sooner recognized this feeling than she rebuked herself for shallowness and a want of charity, yet even so the impression remained. To the artistic temperament, enthusiasm is the only excuse for existence.
"I think Mrs. Fenton is right," she said. "The few form the correct judgment, and the many adopt it in the end because it is based on truth. It seems to me," she continued, thoughtfully, "that the prime condition of effectiveness is constancy, and only that opinion can be constant that has truth for a foundation, because no other basis would remain to hold it up."
"That may be true," was the reply, "if you take matters in a sufficiently long range, but you seem to me to be viewing things from the standpoint of eternity."
The smile with which she said these last words was so charming that Helen warmed toward her, and she smiled also in replying,--
"Isn"t that, after all, the only safe way to look at things?"
"What deep waters we are getting into," Edith commented. "And yet they say women are always frivolous."
"The Boston luncheon," returned Mrs. Frost-winch, "is a solemn a.s.sembly for the discussion of mighty themes. Yesterday, at Mrs. Bodewin Ranger"s, we disposed of all the knotty problems relating to the lower cla.s.ses."
"I didn"t know but it might be something about my house. The last time Mrs. Greyson lunched here we solemnly debated what a wife should do whose husband did not appreciate her."
She spoke brightly, but there was in her tone, an undercurrent of feeling which touched Helen, and betrayed the fact that this return to the old theme was not wholly without a cause. Mrs. Greyson divined that Edith was not happy, and with the keenness of womanly instinct she divined also that there was not perfect harmony between Mrs. Fenton and her husband. She looked up quickly, with an instinctive desire to turn the conversation, but found no words ready.
Edith had at the moment yielded to a woman"s craving for sympathy. An incident which had happened that forenoon troubled and bewildered her.
She had been down town, and remembering a matter of importance about which she had neglected to consult her husband in the morning, she had turned aside to visit his studio, a thing she seldom did in his working hours. She found him painting from a model, and she was kept waiting a moment while the latter retired from sight. She thought nothing of this, but as she stood talking with Arthur, her glance fell upon a wrap which she recognized as belonging to Mrs. Herman, and which had been carelessly left upon the back of a chair in sight. Even this might not have troubled her, had it not been that when she looked questioningly from the garment to her husband, she caught a look of consternation in his eyes. His glance met hers and turned aside with that almost imperceptible wavering which shows the avoidance to be intentional; and a pang of formless terror pierced her.
All the way home she was tormented by the wonder how that wrap could have come in her husband"s studio, and what reason he could have for being disturbed by her seeing it there. She was not a woman given to petty or vulgar jealousy, and she had from the first left the artist perfectly free in his professional relations to be governed by the necessities or the conveniences of his profession. She could not to-day, however, rid herself of the feeling that some mystery lay behind the incident of the morning. She began to frame excuses. She speculated whether it were possible that Arthur were secretly painting the portrait of his friend"s wife, to produce it as a surprise to them all. She said to herself that Ninitta naturally knew models, and might easily have enough of a feeling of comradeship remaining from the time when she had been a model herself, to lend or give them articles of dress. Unfortunately, she knew how Ninitta kept herself aloof from her old a.s.sociates since the birth of her child, and the explanation did not satisfy her.
No faintest suspicion of positive evil entered Edith"s mind. She was only vaguely troubled, the incident forming one more of the trifles which of late had made her very uneasy in regard to her husband. She told herself that she had confidence in Arthur; but the woman who is forced to reflect that she has confidence in her husband has already begun, however unconsciously, to doubt him.
"The question is profound enough," Mrs. Frostwinch answered Edith"s words in her even tones, which somehow seemed to reduce everything to a well-bred abstraction. "Of course the thing for a Woman to do is to remain determinedly ignorant until it would be too palpably absurd to pretend any longer; and then she must get away from him as quietly as possible. The evil in these things is, after all, the stir and the talk, and all the unpleasant and vulgar gossip which inevitably attends them."
Poor Edith cringed as if she had received a blow, and to cover her emotion she gave the signal for rising from the table. But as she did so, her eyes met those of Helen, and the truth leaped from one to the other in one of those glances in which the heart, taken unaware, reveals its joy or its woe with irresistible frankness. Whatever words Edith and Helen might or might not exchange thereafter, the story of Mrs. Fenton"s married life and of the anguish of her soul was told in that look; and her friend understood it fully.
XVII
THE HEAVY MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT.
Measure for Measure; iv.--10.
The temper of clubs, like that of individuals, changes from time to time, however constant remains its temperament. Those who reflected upon such matters noticed that at the St. Filipe Club, where a few years back there had been much talk of art and literature, and abstract principles, there had come to be a more worldly, perhaps a Philistine would say a more mature, flavor to the conversation. There were a good many stories told about its wide fireplaces, and there was much running comment on current topics, political and otherwise. There was, perhaps, a more cosmopolitan air to the talk.
That the old-time flavor could sometimes reappear, however, was evident from the talk going on about nine o"clock on the evening of the day of Edith"s luncheon. The approach of the time set for an exhibition of paintings in the gallery of the club turned the conversation toward art, and as several of the quondam Pagans were present, the old habits of speech rea.s.serted themselves somewhat.
"I understand Fenton"s going to let us see his new picture," somebody said.
"He is if he gets it done," Tom Bently answered. "He"s painting so many portraits nowadays that he didn"t get it finished for the New York exhibition."
"He must be making a lot of money," Fred Rangely observed.
"He needs to to keep his poker playing up," commented Ainsworth.
"He"s lucky if he makes money in these days when it"s the swell thing to have some foreign duffer paint all the portraits," Bently said. "It makes me sick to see the way Englishmen rake in the dollars over here."
"How would you feel," asked Rangely, "if you tried to get a living by writing novels, and found the market glutted with pirated English reprints?"
"Oh, novels," retorted Tom, "they are of no account any way. Modern novels are like modern investments; they are all principle and no interest."
"I like that," put in Ainsworth, "when most of them haven"t any principle at all."
"Neither have investments in the end," Bently returned. "At least I know mine haven"t."
"If you were a writer you"d be spared that pain," was Rangely"s reply, "for want of anything to start an investment with."
"I"ve about come to the conclusion," another member said, "that a man may be excused for making literature his practice, but that he is a fool to make it his profession. It does very well as an amus.e.m.e.nt, but it"s no good as a business."
"The idea is correct," Rangely replied, ringing the bell and ordering from the servant who responded, "although it does not strike me as being either very fresh or very original."
There was a digression for a moment or two while they waited for their drinks and imbibed them. And then Fred, with the air of one who utters a profound truth, and answers questions both spoken and unspoken, observed as he set down his gla.s.s,--
"There"s one thing of which I am sure; American literature will never advance much until women are prevented from writing book reviews."
"Meaning," said Arthur Fenton, entering and with his usual quickness seizing the thread of conversation at once, "that some woman critic or other hit the weak spot in Fred"s last book."
"Hallo, Fenton," called Bently, in his usual explosive fashion. "I haven"t seen you this long time. I did not know whether you were dead or alive."
"Oh, as usual, occupying a middle ground between the two. Are you coming upstairs, Fred?"
A smile ran around the circle.
"At it again, Fenton?" Ainsworth asked. "You"ll have to go West and be made a senator if you keep on playing poker every night."