Peter Quick Banta took the coin with perfect dignity. “Thank you,” said he. “There ain’t much appreciation of art just at this season. But if you’ll come down to Coney about June, I’ll show you some sand-modeling that is sand-modeling—‘s much as five dollars a day I’ve taken in there.”
Miss Holland recovered her social poise.
“I’d like to very much,” she said cheerfully.
She and Julien walked on in silence. Suddenly he laughed, a little jarringly. “Well,” he said, “does that help you to place me?”
“I’m not trying to place you,” she answered.
“Is that quite true?” he mocked.
“No; it isn’t. It’s a downright lie,” said Bobbie finding courage to raise her eyes to his.
“And now, I suppose, I shall be ‘my good man’ or something like that, to you.”
“Do you think it likely?”
“You called MacLachan that, you know,” he reminded her.
“Long ago. When I was—when I didn’t understand Our Square.”
“And now, of course, our every feeling and thought is an open book to your penetrating vision.”
Her lip quivered. “I don’t know why you should want to be so hateful to me.”
For a flashing second his eyes answered that appeal with a look that thrilled and daunted her. “To keep from being something else that I’ve no right to be,” he muttered.
“How many more sittings do you think it will take to finish the picture?” she asked, striving to get on safer ground.
“Only one or two, I suppose,” he answered morosely.
Such was Julien’s condition of mind after the last sitting that he actually left the precious portrait unguarded by neglecting to lock the door of the studio on going out, and the Bonnie Lassie and I, happening in, beheld it in its fulfillment. A slow flush burned its way upward in the Bonnie Lassie’s face as she studied it.
“He’s done it!” she exclaimed. “Flower and flame! Why did I ever take to sculpture? One can’t get that in the metal.”
“He’s done it,” I echoed.
“Of course, technically, it’s rather a sloppy picture.”
“It’s a glorious picture!” I cried.
“Naturally that,” returned the exasperating critic. “It always will be—when you paint with your heart’s blood.”
“Do you think your friend Bobbie appreciates the medium in which she’s presented?”
“If she doesn’t—which she probably does,” said the Bonnie Lassie, “she will find out something to her advantage when she sees me to-morrow. I’m going home to ‘phone her.”
In answer to the summons, Bobbie came. She looked, I thought, as I saw her from my bench, troubled and perplexed and softened, and glowingly lovely. At the door of the Bonnie Lassie’s house she was met with the challenge direct.
“What have you been doing to my artistic ward?”
“Nothing,” replied Bobbie with unwonted meekness, and to prove it related the incidents of the touring-car, the supper at the Taverne Splendide, and the encounter with the paternal colorist.
“That isn’t Julien’s father,” said the sculptress. “He’s only an adoptive father. But Julien adores him, as he ought to. The real father, so I’ve heard, was a French gentleman—”
“I don’t care who his father was!” cried Bobbie. (The Bonnie Lassie’s face took on the expression of an exclamation point.) “I can’t bear to think of his having to do servant’s work. And I told him so yesterday.”
“Did you look like that while you were telling him?”
“Like what? I suppose so.”
“And what did he do?”
“Do? He didn’t do anything.”
“Then,” pronounced the Bonnie Lassie, “he’s a stick of wood—hardwood—with a knot-hole for a heart.”
“He isn’t! Well, perhaps he is. He was very horrid at the last.”
“About what?”
“About taking money.”
“I’m a prophetess! And you’re a patroness. Born in us, I suppose. You did try to give him money.”
“Just to loan it. Enough so that he could go away to study and paint. He wouldn’t even let me do that; so I—I—I offered to buy the picture of me, and he said—he said—Cecily, do you think he’s sometimes a little queer in his head?”
“Not in the head, necessarily. What did he say?”
“He said he’d bought it himself at the highest price ever paid. And he said it so obstinately that I saw it was no use, so I just told him that I hoped I’d see him when I came back—”
“Back from where? Are you going away?”
“Yes; didn’t I tell you? On a three months’ cruise.”
“Had you told him that?”
“Of course. That’s when I tried to get him to take the money. Cecily—” The girl’s voice shook a little. “You’ll tell him, won’t you, that he must keep on painting?”
“Why? Doesn’t he intend to?”
“He said he’d painted himself out and he didn’t think he’d ever look at color again.”
“He will,” said the Bonnie Lassie wisely and comfortably. “Grief is just as driving a taskmaster as lo—as other emotions.”
“Grief!” The girl’s color ebbed. “Cecily! You don’t think I’ve hurt him?”
The Bonnie Lassie caught her in a sudden hug.
“Bobbie, do you know what I’d do in your place?”
“No. What?”
“I’d go right—straight—back to Julien Tenney’s studio.” She paused impressively.
“Yes?” said the other faintly.
“And I’d walk right—straight—up to Julien Tenney—” Another pause, even more impressive.
“I d-d-don’t think I’d—he’d—”
“And I’d say to him: ‘Julien, will you marry me?’ Like that.”
“Oh!” said Bobbie in outraged amazement.
“And maybe—” continued the Bonnie Lassie judicially: “maybe I’d kiss him. Yes. I think I would.”
Suddenly all the bright softness of Bobbie’s large eyes dissolved in tears. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she sobbed.
“You won’t be ashamed of yourself,” prophesied the other, “if you do just as I say, quickly and naturally.”
“Oh, naturally,” retorted the girl in an indignant whimper. “I suppose you think that’s natural. Anyway, he probably doesn’t care about me at all that way.”
“Roberta,” said the sculptress sternly, “did you see his portrait of you?”
“Y-y-yes.”