of big shops, or driving in the Park. If, on his way to the Art Museum,
he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on
upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders
hunched up as if he were cold. He had never known such girls, or heard
them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he
believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted.
He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles,
effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in
embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities. They were enough,
he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, in
thought, and in the universe.
He had no desire to know the woman who had, for the time at least, so
broken up his life,—no curiosity about her every-day personality. He
shunned any revelation of it, and he listened for Miss Bower’s coming and
going, not to encounter, but to avoid her. He wished that the girl who
wore shirt-waists and got letters from Chicago would keep out of his way,
that she did not exist. With her he had naught to make. But in a room
full of sun, before an old mirror, on a little enchanted rug of sleeping
colours, he had seen a woman who emerged naked through a door, and
disappeared naked. He thought of that body as never having been clad, or
as having worn the stuffs and dyes of all the centuries but his own. And
for him she had no geographical associations; unless with Crete, or
Alexandria, or Veronese’s Venice. She was the immortal conception, the
perennial theme.
The first break in Hedger’s lethargy occurred one afternoon when two
young men came to take Eden Bower out to dine. They went into her music
room, laughed and talked for a few minutes, and then took her away with
them. They were gone a long while, but he did not go out for food
himself; he waited for them to come back. At last he heard them coming
down the hall, gayer and more talkative than when they left. One of them
sat down at the piano, and they all began to sing. This Hedger found
absolutely unendurable. He snatched up his hat and went running down the
stairs. Caesar leaped beside him, hoping that old times were coming back.
They had supper in the oysterman’s basement and then sat down in front of
their own doorway. The moon stood full over the Square, a thing of regal
glory; but Hedger did not see the moon; he was looking, murderously, for
men. Presently two, wearing straw hats and white trousers and carrying
canes, came down the steps from his house. He rose and dogged them across
the Square. They were laughing and seemed very much elated about
something. As one stopped to light a cigarette, Hedger caught from the
other:
“Don’t you think she has a beautiful talent?”
His companion threw away his match. “She has a beautiful figure.” They
both ran to catch the stage.
Hedger went back to his studio. The light was shining from her transom.
For the first time he violated her privacy at night, and peered through
that fatal aperture. She was sitting, fully dressed, in the window,
smoking a cigarette and looking out over the housetops. He watched her
until she rose, looked about her with a disdainful, crafty smile, and
turned out the light.
