White Ashes | Page 6

suited for.
He's as clever and amusing as he can be, but he just naturally isn't
practical and no one has ever been able to make him so, and you
yourself are so absolutely practical in everything that you can't excuse
the lack of it in any one else. But he's really all right."
Mr. Hurd looked sharply up, and the lines around his eyes came a little
closer together.
"You don't mean that you're interested in him--seriously, do you?" he
said.
"Oh, no," replied his daughter. "Not at all--that way."

The traction magnate smiled indulgently, with manifest relief.
"I don't want to criticize your analysis of character, Isabel," he said,
"but I think you're dead wrong on one point. In my opinion Mr. Charles
Wilkinson is one of the most practical young men of my acquaintance."
Meanwhile Miss Maitland and her companion had crossed the
Common, and when they came to Boylston Street the shop windows
were all alit and the street lamps began to shine. It was the close of a
cool September day, and a sharp wind whipped the skirt of Pelgram's
frock coat around his legs and flecked the blood into the girl's cheeks as
she stepped briskly westward, swinging along easily while her rather
stout and soft escort, patting the walk with his cane, kept up with some
little difficulty. As often as he dared, the artist glanced at her, and with
hope kindled by gratitude, he thought her never so attractive. And no
matter what might be said of the eccentricity of his artistic taste in
pursuit of the ideal, his selection of the real was indisputably sound;
Miss Maitland was well worth the admiration of any man.
As they came to Portland Street, waiting at the crossing for a motor-car
to pass, Pelgram quite suddenly said, "I wish I could paint you here and
just as you are looking now."
The girl flushed a little. The compliment was conventional enough, but
there was a tone in his voice that she had never heard before and that
carried its meaning clearly.
"Thank you. Is it because the atmosphere and background would be so
ugly--wind and iron and dead leaves and raw brick walls and hideous
advertising signs--and I should seem attractive by comparison?"
Her companion looked thoughtfully ahead, as they crossed the street
and went on.
"No, not that," he said, more gravely than usual. "You don't need any
comparison, but all this isn't really so bad. Perhaps the things you
mention are ugly in themselves, but a certain combination of them
caught at a certain moment can well be worthy of a painting, and I

think we have that moment now. Beauty makes a more pleasant model
for the artist--that is why I would have liked you in the foreground--but
beauty is not the only province of art. If it were, no painter, for example,
would find anything to occupy him in the foul stream that washes the
London wharves--as some critic has said. Yet a great many beautiful
pictures have come from the London wharves, and one, at least, could
come from Boylston Street."
The girl was interested. Behind his intolerable pastels and nuances and
frock coats and superficial pose the man actually had ideas; it was a
pity they showed so seldom. And she wished he would confine himself
to the abstract. She could tolerate his aerial monologues on art even
when his pose seemed to her superficial and almost silly, for
occasionally he said something which was not only clever in sound, but
which, to her thinking, rang true. But on the personal side he was
becoming unpleasantly aggressive. She regarded him with admittedly
mixed feelings, and she was not at all sure just how well she liked him,
but she felt quite certain that she did not wish to have him ask her to
marry him.
When they came to the door of her apartment in Deerfield Street, where
she lived with her mother, he held her hand perceptibly longer than was
necessary in saying farewell.
"You will come to the studio Thursday morning at eleven?" he said
tenderly.
"Yes, certainly," Miss Maitland answered in a matter-of-fact tone.
He hesitated.
"I never wanted to do anything well so much as I want to do your
portrait well. I want to make your portrait by far the finest thing that I
have ever done--or that I ever shall do," he said. "Truly beautiful--and
truly you."
"That is extremely good of you," replied the girl in a perfectly level
voice, manifesting no more emotion than she would have displayed had

he dramatically announced that he purposed executing her likeness on
canvas and that he intended to use oil paints of various colors.
"Good-by," she added, and the door closed behind the artist.
Charles Wilkinson,