why? Why must I do that?” The voice was petulant now, and Madeleine’s became more commanding.
“Because I say so. Come along, now!”
She hung up the receiver with a snap, and summoned Claudine again.
“Dress me quickly,” she commanded, “all but my gown. Do my hair small and plain. Yes—flesh-colored stockings.”
The apt maid understood and with Madeleine’s approval did the dark, soft hair into a compact mass that was becoming but not elaborate.
By the time the negligée was thrown over the silken undergarments there came a light tap at the door.
“That will be Mrs. Sayre,” Madeleine said; “let her in, Claudine, and disappear.”
“Well, sweetie, what’s up?” and Rosamond Sayre dropped into an easy chair and lighted a cigarette.
“Just had to see you,” returned Madeleine, falling back on the chaise longue. “How’s your husband?”
“Harrison? Oh, he’s all right.”
“Funny little man—isn’t he?”
“Yes—why?” Mrs. Sayre seemed in no wise offended.
“But fond of you?”
“As whose husband isn’t—if the wife wants him to be?”
“And proud of you?”
“Why shouldn’t he be?”
Rosamond Sayre looked at herself in a mirror.
“He’d be blind if he didn’t see reason to be proud of me,” she said, airily, flicking her cigarette ashes on the rug.
She gave an impression of absolute self-satisfaction. Her beryl eyes flashed with vanity, her great masses of gold-brown hair clustered over her ears and framed a piquant, bewitching face. Her dashing little figure and vivacious gestures betokened self-reliance, as well as self approval.
“Come on, now, Maddy—out with it,” she said; “I must run, in ten minutes, at most. Going to scold me, kid me—or borrow money of me?” She eyed her friend rather sharply.
“Good guesser!” Madeleine cried. “The third time conquers. I’m going to borrow money of you.”
“Broke—haven’t a cent!” and the beryl eyes showed darker glints in them.
“Pooh, don’t come that over me. Harrison will give you a thousand in a minute—if you ask him prettily.”
“But I wouldn’t ask him—for you.” Rosamond smoked calmly on.
“Oh, do now—Rosy, listen.”
And then Madeleine talked and Rosamond, too, low and earnestly, and very steadily, for several minutes.
And Rosamond Sayre said, “All right—I’ll bring you a thousand to-night—at Emmy Gardner’s. Be there by eleven?”
“I think so; or a few moments later.”
CHAPTER II
THE ARTISTS
The pretentiousness of a studio, especially a Washington Square studio, is quite often in inverse proportion to the merit of the pictures it gives up.
But Tommy Locke’s studio defeated this description by being a golden mean as to both propositions.
Indeed, Henry Post, the artist’s cynical friend, said that Locke’s draperies and his canvases showed a wonderfully similar lack of distinction.
And Kate Vallon had quickly added, “Let’s call them his appointments and disappointments.”
But Tommy Locke had only smiled comfortably and had gone on painting his interminable green and blue landscapes in which, if anybody cared for a certain vague misty charm—they did not find it entirely lacking.
And even if he had no high-backed, gilt-framed Italian arm-chairs and no armor or ragged priests’ robes, he often had good-looking bowls of even better looking flowers and he served first-rate tea, and somehow the neighbors loved to drift in and out of his nondescript rooms.
His ways were ways of pleasantness and all his paths were peace, yet though his chums were usually tolerant and broad-minded thinkers, there was little real Bohemianism in evidence, that is, the Bohemianism of what is known as The Village.
His few worthwhile bits of old furniture stood upon worthwhile old rugs and his specimens of artistic junk were few and far between.
Yet, strangely enough, Tommy Locke himself affected the manner of the comic paper artist—at least, to a degree.
He wore his black hair a bit longer than other men, he wore his big round glasses with very heavy tortoise-shell frames, and he wore his collar soft and loose, with a flowing Windsor tie, usually black.
He was chaffed a bit now and then as to his inconsistencies, but it was generally admitted futile to try to get a rise out of old Tommy.
In fact he calmly stated that his get-up was the only real claim he had to being one of the noble army of artists, and Henry Post had glanced at the misty landscapes and murmured, “Some of your titles show latent talent, I think.”
“It’s so nice to be understood!” Locke had exclaimed. “Yes, I’ll say my ‘Monotony in Sagebrush’ is both meanful and catching.”
“If that’s all you want you may well have called it ‘The Mumps,’ ” Kate Vallon had reported.
These three and another, one Pearl Jane Cutler, formed a sort of chummy quartette, and, though they chummed but seldom, they did most of it in Tommy’s non-committal studio.
“If you’d have a splash of color over that blank looking window,” Kate would suggest, and Tommy would wave away the suggestion without a word.
Then would Pearl Jane, who was remarkably suggestive of Little Annie in Enoch Arden, say, plaintively, “I like it all—just as it is,” and Tommy’s beaming smile would be for her.
They had all finished laughing at her baptismal absurdity—she had been named for the two neighbors on either side of her mother’s house—and without a nickname, they accepted her as Pearl Jane. It was as yet a question what she would sign her masterpieces of art, as she hadn’t, strictly speaking, produced them yet.
She hadn’t been in the city very long, but Washington Square claimed her for its own. She loved it—all four sides—and many of its byways. She dabbled away, with a brush that was, so far, incompetent and irrelevant, but she cheerfully insisted that she was finding herself,
