'Is she?' said Kirk. 'Now I wonder if that makes it worse or better.
I'm trying to think!'
Sybil Wilbur fluttered in next day at noon, a tiny, restless creature
who darted about the studio like a humming-bird. She effervesced with
the joy of life. She uttered little squeaks of delight at everything
she saw. She hugged Ruth, beamed at Kirk, went wild over William
Bannister, thought the studio too cute for words, insisted on being
shown all over it, and talked incessantly.
It was about two o'clock before she actually began to sit, and even
then she was no statue. A thought would come into her small head and
she would whirl round to impart it to Ruth, destroying in a second the
pose which it had taken Kirk ten painful minutes to fix.
Kirk was too amused to be irritated. She was such a friendly little
soul and so obviously devoted to Ruth that he felt she was entitled to
be a nuisance as a sitter. He wondered more and more what weird
principle of selection had been at work to bring Bailey and this
butterfly together. He had never given any deep thought to the study of
his brother-in-law's character; but, from his small knowledge of him,
he would have imagined some one a trifle more substantial and serious
as the ideal wife for him. Life, he conceived, was to Bailey a stately
march. Sybil Wilbur evidently looked on it as a mad gallop.
Ruth felt the same. She was fond of Sybil, but she could not see her as
the fore-ordained Mrs. Bailey.
'I suppose she swept him off his feet,' she said. 'It just shows that
you never really get to know a person even if you're their sister.
Bailey must have all sorts of hidden sides to his character which I
never noticed, unless she has. But I don't think there is much
of that about Sybil. She's just a child. But she's very amusing, isn't
she? She enjoys life so furiously.'
'I think Bailey will find her rather a handful. Does she ever sit
still, by the way? If she is going to act right along as she did to-day
this portrait will look like that cubist picture of the 'Dance at the
Spring'.'
As the sittings went on Miss Wilbur consented gradually to simmer down
and the portrait progressed with a fair amount of speed. But Kirk was
conscious every day of a growing sensation of panic. He was trying his
very hardest, but it was bad work, and he knew it.
His hand had never had very much cunning, but what it had had it had
lost in the years of his idleness. Every day showed him more clearly
that the portrait of Miss Wilbur, on which so much depended, was an
amateurish daub. He worked doggedly on, but his heart was cold with
that chill that grips the artist when he looks on his work and sees it
to be bad.
At last it was finished. Ruth thought it splendid. Sybil Wilbur
pronounced it cute, as she did most things. Kirk could hardly bear to
look at it. In its finished state it was worse than he could have
believed possible.
In the old days he had been a fair painter with one or two bad faults.
Now the faults seemed to have grown like weeds, choking whatever of
merit he might once have possessed. This was a horrible production, and
