"And you've come to one of the crowd to inquire?" Cornelia asked. Up to that moment she had been flattered, too, by his serious appeal to her, and generously pleased. But the chance offered, and she perversely seized it.
He protested with a simple "Ah!" and she was ashamed.
"I don't know," she hurried on to say. "I never thought about it in that way."
"Well, it isn't so simple any more, after you once begin. I don't suppose I shall be at peace quite till I try what I can do; and seeing you Sunday brought Pymantoning all so freshly back, that I've been wondering, from time to time, ever since, whether you could possibly help me."
"I will try, as the good little boy said," Cornelia assented.
"It makes me feel like a good little boy to have asked it." Ludlow did not profit by the chance which the conclusion of their agreement offered him, to go. He stayed and talked on, and from time to time he recurred to what he had asked, and said he was afraid she would think he was using her, and tried to explain that he really was not, but was approaching her most humbly for her opinion. He could not make it out, but they got better and better acquainted in the fun they had with his failures. It went on till Cornelia said, "Now, really, if you keep it up, I shall have to stand you in the corner, with your face to the wall."
"Oh, do!" he entreated. "It would be such a relief."
"You know I was a teacher two winters," she said, "and have actually stood boys in corners."
That seemed to interest him afresh; he made her tell him all about her school-teaching. He stayed till the bell rang for dinner, and he suffered a decent moment to pass before he rose then.
"After all," he said at parting, "I think you'd better decide that it's merely my Manet you're coming to see."
"Yes, merely the Manet," Cornelia assented. "If I choose, the Ludlows will all be stood in the corners with their faces to the wall."
She found her own face very flushed, when she climbed up to her room for a moment before going in to dinner, and her heart seemed to be beating in her neck. She looked at Mrs. Westley's note. It stated everything so explicitly that she did not see why Mr. Ludlow need have come to explain. She remembered now that she had forgotten to tell him she was not going.
XXI
Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley would come for Charmian and herself in her carriage; but when they went down to her in the Synthesis office, they found that she had planned to walk with them to Ludlow's studio. She said it was not a great way off; and she had got into the habit of walking there, when he was painting her; she supposed they would rather walk after their work. Cornelia said "Oh, yes," and Charmian asked, at her perfervidest, Had Mr. Ludlow painted her? and Mrs. Westley answered calmly. Yes; she believed he did not think it very successful; her husband liked it, though. Charmian said, Oh, how much she should like to see it, and Mrs. Westley said she must show it her some time. Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley very pretty, but she decided that she did not care to see Ludlow's picture of her.
His studio stood a little back from the sidewalk; it was approached by a broad sloping pavement, and had two wide valves for the doorway. He opened the door himself, at their ring, and they found themselves in a large, gray room which went to the roof, with its vaulted ceiling; this was pierced with a vast window, that descended half-way down the northward wall. "My studio started in life as a gentleman's stable; then it fell into the hands of a sculptor, and then it got as low as a painter." He said to Charmian, "Mr. Plaisdell has told me how ingeniously you treated one of your rooms that you took for a studio."
Charmian answered with dark humility, "But a studio without a painter in it!" and there were some offers and refusals of compliment between them, which ended in his saying that he would like to see her studio, and her saying that Mrs. Maybough would always be glad to see him. Then he talked with Mrs. Westley, who was very pleasant to Cornelia while the banter with Charmian went on, and proposed to show his pictures; he fancied that was what he had got them there, for; but he would make a decent pretence of the Manet, first.
The Manet was one of that painter's most excessive; it was almost insolent in its defiance of the old theory and method of art. "He had to go too far, in those days, or he wouldn't have arrived anywhere," Ludlow said, dreamily, as he stood looking with them at the picture. "He fell back to the point he had really meant to reach." He put the picture away amidst the sighs and murmurs of Mrs. Westley and Charmian, and the silence of Cornelia, which he did not try to break. He began to show his own pictures, taking them at random, as it seemed, from the ranks of canvasses faced against the wall. "You know we impressionists are nothing if not prolific," he said, and he kept turning the frame on his easel, now for a long picture, and now for a tall one. The praises of the others followed him, but Cornelia could not speak. Some of the pictures she did not like; some she thought were preposterous; but there were some that she found brilliantly successful, and a few that charmed her with their delicate and tender poetry. He said something about most of them, in apology or extenuation; Cornelia believed that she knew which he liked by his not saying anything of them.
Suddenly he set a large picture on the easel that quite filled the frame. "Trotting Match at the Pymantoning County Fair," he announced, and he turned away and began to make tea in a little battered copper kettle over a spirit-lamp, on a table strewn with color-tubes in the corner.
"Ah, yes," said Mrs. Westley. "I remember this at the American Artists; three or four years ago, wasn't it? But you've done something to it, haven't you?"
"Improved with age," said Ludlow, with his back toward them, bent above his tea-kettle. "That's all."
"It seems like painting a weed, though," said Charmian. "How can you care for such subjects?"
Ludlow came up to her with the first cup of tea. "It's no use to paint lilies, you know."
"Do you call that an answer?"
"A poor one."
He brought Mrs. Westley some tea, and then he came to Cornelia with a cup in each hand, one for her, and one for himself, and frankly put himself between her and the others. "Well, what do you think of it?" he asked, as if there were no one else but they two.
She felt a warm flush of pleasure in his boldness. "I don't know. It's like it; that's the way I've always seen it; and it's beautiful. But somehow——"
"What?"
"It looks as if it were somewhere else."
"You've hit it," said Ludlow. "It serves me right. You see I was so anxious to prove that an American subject was just as susceptible of impressionistic treatment as a French one, that I made this look as French as I could. I must do it again and more modestly; not be so patronizing. I should like to come out there next fall again, and see another trotting-match. I suppose they'll have one?"
"They always have them; it wouldn't be the Fair without them," said Cornelia.
"Well, I must come, and somehow do it on the spot; that's the only way." He pulled himself more directly in front of her and ignored the others, who talked about his picture with faded interest to each other, and then went about, and looked at the objects in the studio. "I don't think I made myself quite clear the other day, about what I wanted to do in this way." He plunged into the affair again, and if Cornelia did not understand it better, it was not for want of explanation. Perhaps she did not listen very closely. All the time