Her brows met in a little frown. Her eyebrows were thick and strongly marked and a little uneven and inclined to meet over her nose. Paula’s brows were a mere line of black—a carefully traced half-parenthesis above her unmysterious dark eyes. “I’d rather,” Dallas said, slowly, “plan one back door of a building that’s going to help make this town beautiful and significant than sell all the bonds that ever floated a—whatever it is that bonds are supposed to float.”
He defended himself. “I felt that way, too. But you see my mother had given me my education, really. She worked for it. I couldn’t go dubbing along, earning just enough to keep me. I wanted to give her things. I wanted—”
“Did she want those things? Did she want you to give up architecture and go into bonds?”
“Well—she—I don’t know that she exactly—” He was too decent—still too much the son of Selina DeJong—to be able to lie about that.
“You said you were going to let me meet her.”
“Would you let me bring her in? Or perhaps you’d even—would you drive out to the farm with me some day. She’d like that so much.”
“So would I.”
He leaned toward her, suddenly. “Listen, Dallas. What do you think of me, anyway?” He wanted to know. He couldn’t stand not knowing any longer.
“I think you’re a nice young man.”
That was terrible. “But I don’t want you to think I’m a nice young man. I want you to like me—a lot. Tell me, what haven’t I got that you think I ought to have? Why do you put me off so many times? I never feel that I’m really near you. What is it I lack?” He was abject.
“Well, if you’re asking for it. I do demand of the people I see often that they possess at least a splash of splendour in their makeup. Some people are nine tenths splendour and one tenth tawdriness, like Gene Meran. And some are nine tenths tawdriness and one tenth splendour, like Sam Huebch. But some people are all just a nice even pink without a single patch of royal purple.”
“And that’s me, h’m?”
He was horribly disappointed, hurt, wretched. But a little angry, too. His pride. Why, he was Dirk DeJong, the most successful of Chicago’s younger men; the most promising; the most popular. After all, what did she do but paint commercial pictures for fifteen hundred dollars apiece?
“What happens to the men who fall in love with you? What do they do?”
Dallas stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “They usually tell me about it.”
“And then what?”
“Then they seem to feel better and we become great friends.”
“But don’t you ever fall in love with them?” Pretty damned sure of herself. “Don’t you ever fall in love with them?”
“I almost always do,” said Dallas.
He plunged. “I could give you a lot of things you haven’t got, purple or no purple.”
“I’m going to France in April. Paris.”
“What d’you mean! Paris. What for?”
“Study. I want to do portraits. Oils.”
He was terrified. “Can’t you do them here?”
“Oh, no. Not what I need. I have been studying here. I’ve been taking life-work three nights a week at the Art Institute, just to keep my hand in.”
“So that’s where you are, evenings.” He was strangely relieved. “Let me go with you some time, will you?” Anything. Anything.
She took him with her one evening, steering him successfully past the stern Irishman who guarded the entrance to the basement classrooms; to her locker, got into her smock, grabbed her brushes. She rushed down the hall. “Don’t talk,” she cautioned him. “It bothers them. I wonder what they’d think of my shop.” She turned into a small, cruelly bright, breathlessly hot little room, its walls whitewashed. Every inch of the floor space was covered with easels. Before them stood men and women, brushes in hand, intent. Dallas went directly to her place, fell to work at once. Dirk blinked in the strong light. He glanced at the dais toward which they were all gazing from time to time as they worked. On it lay a nude woman.
To himself Dirk said in a sort of panic: “Why, say, she hasn’t got any clothes on! My gosh! this is fierce. She hasn’t got anything on!” He tried, meanwhile, to look easy, careless, critical. Strangely enough, he succeeded, after the first shock, not only in looking at ease, but feeling so. The class was doing the whole figure in oils.
The model was a moron with a skin like velvet and rose petals. She fell into poses that flowed like cream. Her hair was waved in wooden undulations and her nose was pure vulgarity and her earrings were drugstore pearls in triple strands but her back was probably finer than Helen’s and her breasts twin snowdrifts peaked with coral. In twenty minutes Dirk found himself impersonally interested in tone, shadows, colours, line. He listened to the low-voiced instructor and squinted carefully to ascertain whether that shadow on the model’s stomach really should be painted blue or brown. Even he could see that Dallas’s canvas was almost insultingly superior to that of the men and women about her. Beneath the flesh on her canvas there were muscles, and beneath those muscles blood and bone. You felt she had a surgeon’s knowledge of anatomy. That, Dirk decided, was what made her commercial pictures so attractive. The drawing she had done for the Great Lakes Trust Company’s bond department had been conventional enough in theme. The treatment, the technique, had made it arresting. He thought that if she ever did portraits in oils they would be vital and compelling portraits. But oh, he wished she didn’t want to do portraits in oils. He wished—
It was after eleven when they emerged from the Art Institute doorway and stood a moment together at the top of the broad steps surveying the world that lay before them. Dallas said nothing. Suddenly the beauty of the night rushed up and overwhelmed Dirk. Gorgeousness and tawdriness; colour and
