"I think I willKelly."
He smiled as he painted:
"I don't know why the devil they call me Kelly," he mused. "No episode that I ever heard of is responsible for that Milesian misnomer. Quand même! It sounds prettier from you than it ever did before. I'd rather hear you call me Kelly than Caruso sing my name as Algernon."
"Shall I really call you Kelly?"
"Sure thing! Why not?"
"I don't know. You're rather celebratedto have a girl call you Kelly."
He puffed out his chest in pretence of pompous satisfaction:
"True, child. Good men are scarcebut the good and great are too nearly extinct for such familiarity. Call me Mr. Kelly."
"I won't. You are only a big boy, anywayLouis Nevilleand sometimes I shall call you Kelly, and sometimes Louis, and very occasionally Mr. Neville."
"All right," he said, absently"only hold that distractingly ornamental head and those incomparable shoulders a trifle more steady, pleaserest solidly on the left leglet the right hip fall into its natural positionthat's it. Thank you."
Holding the pose her eyes wandered from him and his canvas to the evening tinted clouds already edged with deeper gold. Through the sheet of glass above she saw a shred of white fleece in mid-heaven turn to a pale pink.
"I wonder why you asked me to tea?" she mused.
"What?" He turned around to look at her.
"You never before asked me to do such a thing," she said, candidly.
"You're an absent-minded man, Mr. Neville."
"It never occurred to me," he retorted, amused. "Tea is weak-minded."
"It occurred to me. That's what part of my 'thorough talk' is to be about; your carelessness in noticing me except professionally."
He continued working, rapidly now; and it seemed to her as though somethinga hint of the sombrehad come into his facenothing definitebut the smile was no longer there, and the brows were slightly knitted.
Later he glanced up impatiently at the sky: the summer clouds wore a deeper rose and gold.
"We'd better have our foolish tea," he said, abruptly, driving his brushes into a bowl of black soap and laying aside his palette for his servant to clean later.
For a while, not noticing her, he fussed about his canvas, using a knife here, a rag there, passing to and fro across the scaffolding, oblivious of the flight of time, until at length the waning light began to prophesy dusk, and he came to himself with a guilty start.
Below, in the studio, Valerie sat, fully dressed except for hat and gloves, head resting in the padded depths of an armchair, watching him in silence.
"I declare," he said, looking down at her contritely, "I never meant to keep you all this time. Good Lord! Have I been puttering up here for an hour and a half! It's nearly eight o'clock! Why on earth didn't you speak to me, Valerie?"
"It's a braver girl than I am who'll venture to interrupt you at work, Kelly," she said, laughingly. "I'm a little afraid of you."
"Nonsense! I wasn't doing anything. My Heaven!can it be eight o'clock?"
"It is. You said we were going to have tea."
"Tea! Child, you can't have tea at eight o'clock! I'm terribly sorry"he came down the ladder, vexed with himself, wiping the paint from his hands with a bunch of cheese cloth"I'm humiliated and ashamed, Miss West. Wait a moment"
He walked hastily through the next room into his small suite of apartments, washed his hands, changed his painter's linen blouse for his street coat, and came back into the dim studio.
"I'm really sorry, Valerie," he said. "It was rotten rude of me."
"So am I sorry. It's absurd, but I feel like a perfectly unreasonable kid about it. You never before asked meand Iwanted tostayso much"
"Why didn't you remind me, you foolish child!"
"Somehow I couldn't. I wanted you to think of it."
"Well, I'm a chump." He stood before her in the dim light; she still reclined in the armchair, not looking at him, one arm crook'd over her head and the fingers closed tightly over the rosy palm which was turned outward, resting across her forehead.
For a few moments neither spoke; then:
"I'm horridly lonely to-night," she said, abruptly.
"Why, Valerie! What aan unusual"
"I want to talk to you. I suppose you are too hungry to want to talk now."
"N-no, I'm not." He began to laugh: "What's the matter, Valerie? What is on your mind? Have you any serious fidgets, or are you just a spoiled, pretty girl?"
"Spoiled, Kelly. There's nothing really the matter. I just felt likewhat you asked me to do"
She jumped up suddenly, biting her lips with vexation: "I don't know what I'm sayingexcept that it's rather rude of meand I've got to go home. Good-nightI think my hat is in the dressing-room"
He stood uneasily watching her pin it before the mirror; he could just see her profile and the slender, busy hands white in the dusk.
When she returned, slowly drawing on her long gloves, she said to him with composure:
"Some day ask me again. I really would like itif you would."
"Do you really think that you could stand the excitement of taking a cup of weak tea with me," he said, jestingly"after all those jolly dinners and suppers and theatres and motor parties that I hear about?"
She nodded and held out her hand with decision:
"Good-night."
He retained her hand a moment, not meaning tonot really intending to ask her what he did ask her. And she raised her velvet eyes gravely:
"Do you really want me?"
"Yes. I don't know why I never asked you before"
"It was absurd not to," she said, impulsively; "I'd have gone anywhere with you the first day I ever knew you! Besides, I dress well enough for you not to be ashamed of me."
He began to laugh: "Valerie, you funny little thing! You funny, funny little thing!"
"Not in the slightest," she retorted, sedately. "I'm having a heavenly time for the first time in my life, and I have so wanted you to be part of it of course you are part of it," she added, hastily"most of it! I only meant that II'd like to be a little in your other lifehave you enter mine, a littlejust so I can remember, in years to come, an evening with you now and thento see things going on around usto hear what you think of things that we see together. Because, with you, I feel so divinely free, so unembarrassed, so entirely off my guard. I don't mean to say that I don't have a splendid time with the others even when I have to watch them; I doand even the watching is fun"
The child-like audacity and laughing frankness, the confidence of her attitude toward him were delightfully refreshing. He looked into her pretty, eager, engaging face, smiling, captivated.
"Valerie," he said, "tell me somethingwill you?"
"Yes, if I can."
"I'm more or less of a painting machine. I've made myself so, deliberatelyto the exclusion of other interests. I wonder"he looked at her musingly"whether I'm carrying it too far for my own good."
"I don't understand."
"I meanis there anything machine-made about my work? Does it lackdoes it lack anything?"
"No!" she said, indignantly loyal. "Why do you ask me that?"
"Peoplesome people say it does lacka certain quality."
She said with supreme contempt: "You must not believe them. I also hear thingsand I know it is an unworthy jealousy that"
"What have you heard?" he interrupted.
"Absurdities. I don't wish even to think of them"
"I wish you to. Please. Such things are sometimes significant."
"I wish you to. Please. Such things are sometimes significant."
"Butis there any significance in what a few envious artists sayor a few silly models"
"More significance in what they say than in a whole chorus of professional critics."
"Are you serious?" she asked, astonished.
"Perfectly. Without naming anybody or betraying any confidence, what have you heard in criticism of my work? It's from models and brother painters that the real truth comesusually distorted, half told, maliciously hinted sometimesbut usually the germ of truth is to be found in what they say, however they may choose to say it."
Valerie leaned back against the door, hands clasped behind her, eyebrows bent slightly inward in an unwilling effort to remember.
Finally she said impatiently: "They don't know what they're talking about. They all say, substantially, the same thing"
"What is that thing?"
"Whyoh, it's too silly to repeatbut they say there is nothing lovable about your workthat it's inhumanly and coldly perfecttootoo" she flushed and laughed uncertainly"'too damn omniscient' is what one celebrated man said. And I could have boxed his large, thin, celebrated ears for him!"
"Go on," he nodded; "what else do they say?"
"Nothing. That's all they can find to sayall they dare say. You know what they arewhat other men areand some of the younger girls, too. Not that I don't like themand they are very sweet to meonly they're not like you"
"They're more human. Is that it, Valerie?"
"No, I don't mean that!"
"Yes, you do. You mean that the others take life in a perfectly human mannerfind enjoyment, amusement in each other, in a hundred things outside of their work. They act like men and women, not like a painting machine; if they experience impulses and emotions they don't entirely stifle 'em. They have time and leisure to foregather, laugh, be silly, discuss, banter, flirt, make love, and cut up all the various harmless capers that humanity is heir to. That's what you mean, but you don't realise it. And you think, and they think, that my solemn and owlish self-suppression is drying me up, squeezing out of me the essence of that warm, lovable humanity in which, they say, my work is deficient. They say, too, that my inspiration is lacking in that it is not founded on personal experience; that I have never known any deep emotion, any suffering, any of the sterner, darker regretsanything of that passion which I sometimes depict. They say that the personal and convincing element is totally absent because I have not lived"he laughed"and loved; that my work lacks the one thing which only the self-knowledge of great happiness and great pain can lend to it. AndI think they are right, Valerie. What do you think?"
The girl stood silent, with lowered eyes, reflecting for a moment. Then she looked up curiously.
"Have you never been very unhappy?"
"I had a toothache once."
She said, unsmiling: "Haven't you ever suffered mentally?"
"Nonot seriously. Oh, I've regretted little secret meannessesbad temper, jealousy"
"Nothing else? Have you never experienced deep unhappinessthrough death, for example?"
"No, thank God. My father and mother and sister are living. It is rather strange," he added, partly to himself, "that the usual troubles and sorrows have so far passed me by. I am twenty-seven; there has never been a death in my family, or among my intimate friends."
"Have you any intimate friends?"
"Wellperhaps notin the strict sense. I don't confide."
"Have you never cared, very much, for anybodyany woman?"
"Not sentimentally," he returned, laughing. "Do you think that a good course of modern flirtationa thorough schooling in the old-fashioned misfortunes of true love would inject into my canvases that elusively occult quality they're all howling for?"
She remained smilingly silent.
"Perhaps something less strenuous would do," he said, mischievously"a pretty amourette?just one of those gay, frivolous, Louis XV affairs with some daintily receptive girl, not really improper, but only ultra fashionable. Do you think that would help some, Valerie?"
She raised her eyes, still smiling, a little incredulous, very slightly embarrassed:
"I don't think your painting requires any such sacrifices of you, Mr. Neville. Are you going to take me somewhere to dinner? I'm dreadfully hungry."
"You poor little girl, of course I am. Besides, you must be suffering under the terrible suppression of that 'thorough talk' which you"
"It doesn't really require a thorough talk," she said; "I'll tell you now what I had to say. No, don't interrupt, please! I want toplease let meso that nothing will mar our enjoyment of each other and of the gay world around us when we are dining. It is this: Sometimesonce in a whileI become absurdly lonely, which makes me a fool, temporarily. Andwill you let me telephone you at such times?just to talk to youperhaps see you for a minute?"
"Of course. You know my telephone number. Call me up whenever you like."
"Could I see you at such moments? Ithere's asomea kind of sentiment about mewhen I'm very lonely; and I've been foolish enough to let one or two men see itin fact I've been rather indiscreetsillywith a manseveral mennow and then. A lonely girl is easily sympathised withand rather likes it; and is inclined to let herself go a little. I don't want to. And at times I've done it. Sam Ogilvy nearly kissed me, which really doesn't countdoes it? But I let Harry Annan do it, once. If I'm weak enough to drift into such silliness I'd better find a safeguard. I've been thinkingthinkingthat it really does originate in a sort of foolish loneliness not in anything worse. So I thought I'd have a thorough talk with you about it. I'm twenty-onewith all my experience of life and of men crowded into a single winter and spring. I have as friends only the few people I have met through you. I have nobody to see unless I see themnowhere to go unless I go where they ask me. So I thought I'd ask you to let me depend a little on you, sometimesas a refuge from isolation and morbid thinking now and then. And from other mischieffor which I apparently have a capacityto judge by what I've doneand what I've let men do already."
She laid her hand lightly on his arm in sudden and impulsive confidence:
"That's my 'thorough talk.' I haven't any one else to tell it to. And I've told you the worst." She smiled at him adorably: "And now I am ready to go out with you," she said,"go anywhere in the world with you, Kelly. And I am going to be perfectly happyif you are."
CHAPTER III
One day toward the middle of June Valerie did not arrive on time at the studio. She had never before been late.
About two o'clock Sam Ogilvy sauntered in, a skull pipe in his mouth, his hair rumpled:
"It's that damn mermaid of mine," he said, "can't you come up and look at her and tell me what's the trouble, Kelly?"
"Not now. Who's posing?"
"Rita. She's in a volatile humour, toofidgets; denies fidgeting; reproaches me for making her keep quiet; says I draw like a bum chimneyno wonder my work's rotten! Besides, she's in a tub of water, wearing that suit of fish-scales I had made for Violet Cliland, and she says it's too tight and she's tired of the job, anyway. Fancy my mental condition."
"Oh, she won't throw you down. Rita is a good sport," said Neville.
"I hope so. It's an important picture. Really, Kelly, it's great stuffa still, turquoise-tinted pool among wet rocks; ebb tide; a corking little mermaid caught in a pool left by the receding wavesall tones and subtle values," he declared, waving his arm.