They had grown to like him, to accept him as
almost one of themselves; though of course they looked down upon
him with amused pity for his imbecility regarding his paintings.
"Get out of here," continued Hunt, "or cut out all this noise that comes
from your having a brain that rattles. I've got to work."
Hunt turned again to his easel, and Old Jimmie, still grinning, lowered
himself into a chair, lit a cigar, and winked at Barney. Hunt, with brush
poised, regarded Maggie a moment.
"You there, Maggie," he ordered, "chin up a bit more, some flash in
your eyes, more pep in your bearing--as though you were asking all the
dames of the Winter Garden, and the Charity Ball, and the Horse Show,
and that gang of tea-swilling women at the Ritzmore you sell cigarettes
to--as though you were asking them all who the dickens they think they
are ... O God, can't you do anything!"
"I'm doing the best I can, and I look more like those dames than you
look like a painter!"
"Shut up! I'm paying you a dollar an hour to pose, not to talk back to
me. And you'd have more respect for my money if you knew how hard
I had to work to earn it: carrying a motor car around in each hand.
Wash off that scowl and try to look as I said ... There, that's better.
Hold it."
He began to paint rapidly, with quick glances back and forth between
the canvas and Maggie. Maggie's dress was just the ordinary shirt-
waist and skirt that the shopgirl and her sisters wear; Hunt had ordered
it so. She was above the medium height, with thick black hair tinted
with shadowy blue, long dark lashes, dark scimitars of eyebrows, a full,
firm mouth, a nose with just the right tilt to it-- all effective points for
Hunt in what he wished to do. But what had attracted him most and
given him his idea was her look; hardly pertness, or impudence--rather
a cynical, mature, defiant certainty in herself.
Erect in her cheap shirt-waist, she gazed off into space with a smiling,
confident challenge to all the world. Hunt was trying to make his
picture a true portrait--and also make it a symbol of many things which
still were only taking shape in his own mind: of beauty rising from the
gutter to overcome beauty of more favored birth, and to reign above it;
also of a lower stratum surging up and breaking through the upper
stratum, becoming a part of it, or assimilating it, or conquering it.
Leading families replaced by other families, classes replaced by other
classes, nations replaced by other nations--such was the inevitable
social process--so read the records of the fifty or sixty centuries since
history began to be written. Oh, he was trying to say a lot in this
portrait of a girl of ordinary birth--even less than ordinary--in her cheap
shirt-waist and skirt!
And it pleased the sardonic element in Hunt's unmoral nature that this
Maggie, through whom he was trying to symbolize so much, he knew
to be a petty larcenist: shoplifting and matters of similar consequence.
She had been cynically frank about this to him; casual, almost boastful.
Her possessing a bent toward such activities was hardly to be wondered
at, with her having Old Jimmie as her father, and the Duchess as a
landlady, and having for acquaintances such gentlemen as Barney
Palmer and this returning prison-bird, Larry Brainard.
But petty crime, thought Hunt, would not be Maggie's forte if she
developed her possibilities. With her looks, her boldness, her
cleverness, she had the makings of a magnificent adventuress. As he
painted, he wondered what she was going to do, and become; and he
watched her not only with a painter's eye intent upon the present, but
with keen speculation upon the future.
CHAPTER III
Presently Hunt's mind shifted to Larry Brainard, whom Barney Palmer
and Old Jimmie Carlisle had come here to see. Hunt had a mind curious
about every thing and every one; and blustering, bullying creature
though he was, he had the gift, possessed by but few, of audaciously
thrusting himself into other people's affairs without arousing their
resentment. He was keen to learn Maggie's attitude toward Larry; and
he spoke not so much to gain knowledge of Larry as to draw her out.
"This Larry--what sort of chap is he, Maggie?" As with most artists,
talking did not interfere with Hunt's painting.
Warm color slowly tinted Maggie's cheeks. "He's clever," she said
positively. "You already know that. But I was only a girl when he was
sent away."
Hunt smiled at her idea of her present maturity, implied by her last
sentence. "But you lived with the Duchess for a
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