interesting article about that?"
"Not in Craft I hope?" ventured Wheeler.
"No, I don't think so. Harper's Bazaar, I believe."
"Oh, pshaw!" exclaimed Wheeler. "Harper's Bazaar! What rot!"
"But that's just what you ought to have. Why don't you do it – right?"
"I will," he said.
Eugene went to the piano and turned over a pile of music. Again he came across the unfamiliar, the strange, the obviously distinguished – Grieg's "Arabian Dance"; "Es war ein Traum" by Lassen; "Elegie" by Massenet; "Otidi" by Davydoff; "Nymphs and Shepherds" by Purcell – things whose very titles smacked of color and beauty. Gluck, Sgambati, Rossini, Tschaikowsky – the Italian Scarlatti – Eugene marvelled at what he did not know about music.
"Play something," he pleaded, and with a smile Miriam stepped to the piano.
"Do you know 'Es war ein Traum'?" she inquired.
"No," said he.
"That's lovely," put in Wheeler. "Sing it!"
Eugene had thought that possibly she sang, but he was not prepared for the burst of color that came with her voice. It was not a great voice, but sweet and sympathetic, equal to the tasks she set herself. She selected her music as she selected her clothes – to suit her capacity. The poetic, sympathetic reminiscence of the song struck home. Eugene was delighted.
"Oh," he exclaimed, bringing his chair close to the piano and looking into her face, "you sing beautifully."
She gave him a glittering smile.
"Now I'll sing anything you want for you if you go on like that."
"I'm crazy about music," he said; "I don't know anything about it, but I like this sort of thing."
"You like the really good things. I know. So do I."
He felt flattered and grateful. They went through "Otidi," "The Nightingale," "Elegie," "The Last Spring" – music Eugene had never heard before. But he knew at once that he was listening to playing which represented a better intelligence, a keener selective judgment, a finer artistic impulse than anyone he had ever known had possessed. Ruby played and Angela, the latter rather well, but neither had ever heard of these things he was sure. Ruby had only liked popular things; Angela the standard melodies – beautiful but familiar. Here was someone who ignored popular taste – was in advance of it. In all her music he had found nothing he knew. It grew on him as a significant fact. He wanted to be nice to her, to have her like him. So he drew close and smiled and she always smiled back. Like the others she liked his face, his mouth, his eyes, his hair.
"He's charming," she thought, when he eventually left; and his impression of her was of a woman who was notably and significantly distinguished.
CHAPTER XXI
But Miriam Finch's family, of which she seemed so independent, had not been without its influence on her. This family was of Middle West origin, and did not understand or sympathize very much with the artistic temperament. Since her sixteenth year, when Miriam had first begun to exhibit a definite striving toward the artistic, her parents had guarded her jealously against what they considered the corrupting atmosphere of the art world. Her mother had accompanied her from Ohio to New York, and lived with her while she studied art in the art school, chaperoning her everywhere. When it became advisable, as she thought, for Miriam to go abroad, she went with her. Miriam's artistic career was to be properly supervised. When she lived in the Latin Quarter in Paris her mother was with her; when she loitered in the atmosphere of the galleries and palaces in Rome it was with her mother at her side. At Pompeii and Herculaneum – in London and in Berlin – her mother, an iron-willed little woman at forty-five at that time, was with her. She was convinced that she knew exactly what was good for her daughter and had more or less made the girl accept her theories. Later, Miriam's personal judgment began to diverge slightly from that of her mother and then trouble began.
It was vague at first, hardly a definite, tangible thing in the daughter's mind, but later it grew to be a definite feeling that her life was being cramped. She had been warned off from association with this person and that; had been shown the pitfalls that surround the free, untrammelled life of the art studio. Marriage with the average artist was not to be considered. Modelling from the nude, particularly the nude of a man, was to her mother at first most distressing. She insisted on being present and for a long time her daughter thought that was all right. Finally the presence, the viewpoint, the intellectual insistence of her mother, became too irksome, and an open break followed. It was one of those family tragedies which almost kill conservative parents. Mrs. Finch's heart was practically broken.
The trouble with this break was that it came a little too late for Miriam's happiness. In the stress of this insistent chaperonage she had lost her youth – the period during which she felt she should have had her natural freedom. She had lost the interest of several men who in her nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first years had approached her longingly, but who could not stand the criticism of her mother. At twenty-eight when the break came the most delightful love period was over and she felt grieved and resentful.
At that time she had insisted on a complete and radical change for herself. She had managed to get, through one art dealer and another, orders for some of her spirited clay figurines. There was a dancing girl, a visualization of one of the moods of Carmencita, a celebrated dancer of the period, which had caught the public fancy – at least the particular art dealer who was handling her work for her had managed to sell some eighteen replicas of it at $175 each. Miss Finch's share of this was $100, each. There was another little thing, a six-inch bronze called "Sleep," which had sold some twenty replicas at $150 each, and was still selling. "The Wind," a figure crouching and huddling as if from cold, was also selling. It looked as though she might be able to make from three to four thousand dollars a year steadily.
She demanded of her mother at this time the right to a private studio, to go and come when she pleased, to go about alone wherever she wished, to have men and women come to her private apartment, and be entertained by her in her own manner. She objected to supervision in any form, cast aside criticism and declared roundly that she would lead her own life. She realized sadly while she was doing it, however, that the best was gone – that she had not had the wit or the stamina to do as she pleased at the time she most wanted to do so. Now she would be almost automatically conservative. She could not help it.
Eugene when he first met her felt something of this. He felt the subtlety of her temperament, her philosophic conclusions, what might be called her emotional disappointment. She was eager for life, which seemed to him odd, for she appeared to have so much. By degrees he got it out of her, for they came to be quite friendly and then he understood clearly just how things were.
By the end of three months and before Christina Channing appeared, Eugene had come to the sanest, cleanest understanding with Miss Finch that he had yet reached with any woman. He had dropped into the habit of calling there once and sometimes twice a week. He had learned to understand her point of view, which was detachedly æsthetic and rather removed from the world of the sensuous. Her ideal of a lover had been fixed to a certain extent by statues and poems of Greek youth – Hylas, Adonis, Perseus, and by those men of the Middle Ages painted by Millais, Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. She had hoped for a youth with a classic outline of face, distinction of form, graciousness of demeanor and an appreciative intellect. He must be manly but artistic. It was a rather high ideal, not readily capable of attainment by a woman already turned thirty, but nevertheless worth dreaming about.
Although she had surrounded herself with talented youth as much as possible – both young
