“No, I’ve noticed that.”
There was a pause. With a sinking of the heart, for the topic was one on which he felt he could rather spread himself, George perceived that the girl regarded the subject of dogs as fully threshed out. He stood for a while licking his lips in thoughtful silence.
“So you come from the West?” said Molly.
“Yes.”
“It must be nice out there.”
“Yes.”
“Prairies and all that sort of thing.”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t a cowboy, are you?”
“No. I am an artist,” said George proudly.
“An artist? Paint pictures, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Have you a studio?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Yes. I mean, near Washington Square. In a place called the Sheridan.”
“The Sheridan? Really? Then perhaps you know Mr. Beamish?”
“Yes. Oh, yes. Yes.”
“He’s a dear, isn’t he? I’ve known him all my life.”
“Yes.”
“It must be jolly to be an artist.”
“Yes.”
“I’d love to see some of your pictures.”
Warm thrills permeated George’s system.
“May I send you one of them?” he bleated.
“That’s awfully sweet of you.”
So uplifted was George Finch by this wholly unexpected development that there is no saying what heights of eloquence he might not now have reached, had he been given another ten minutes of the girl’s uninterrupted society. The fact that she was prepared to accept one of his pictures seemed to bring them very close together. He had never yet met anybody who would. For the first time since their interview had begun he felt almost at his ease.
Unfortunately, at this moment the door opened: and like a sharp attack of poison-gas Mrs. Waddington floated into the room.
“What are you doing down here, Molly?” she said.
She gave George one of those looks of hers, and his newly-born sangfroid immediately turned blue at the roots.
“I’ve been talking to Mr. Finch, mother. Isn’t it interesting—Mr. Finch is an artist. He paints pictures.”
Mrs. Waddington did not reply: for she had been struck suddenly dumb by a hideous discovery. Until this moment she had not examined George with any real closeness. When she had looked at him before it had been merely with the almost impersonal horror and disgust with which any hostess looks at an excrescence who at the eleventh hour horns in on one of her carefully planned dinners. His face, though revolting, had had no personal message for her.
But now it was different. Suddenly this young man’s foul features had become fraught with a dreadful significance. Subconsciously, Mrs. Waddington had been troubled ever since she had heard them by the words Molly had spoken in her bedroom: and now they shot to the surface of her mind like gruesome things from the dark depths of some sinister pool. “The sort of man I think I should rather like,” Molly had said, “would be a sort of slimmish, smallish man with nice brown eyes and rather gold-y, chestnutty hair.” She stared at George. Yes! He was slimmish. He was also smallish. His eyes, though far from nice, were brown: and his hair was undeniably of a chestnut hue.
“Who sort of chokes and turns pink and twists his fingers and makes funny noises and trips over his feet. …” Thus had the description continued, and precisely thus was the young man before her now behaving. For her gaze had had the worst effect on George Finch, and seldom in his career had he choked more throatily, turned a brighter pink, twisted his fingers into a more intricate pattern, made funnier noises and tripped more heartily over his feet than he was doing now. Mrs. Waddington was convinced. It had been no mere imaginary figure that Molly had described, but a living, breathing pestilence—and this was he.
And he was an artist! Mrs. Waddington shuddered. Of all the myriad individuals that went to make up the kaleidoscopic life of New York, she disliked artists most. They never had any money. They were dissolute and feckless. They attended dances at Webster Hall in strange costumes, and frequently played the ukulele. And this man was one of them.
“I suppose,” said Molly, “we’d better go upstairs?”
Mrs. Waddington came out of her trance.
“You had better go upstairs,” she said, emphasising the pronoun in a manner that would have impressed itself upon the least sensitive of men. George got it nicely.
“I—er—think, perhaps,” he mumbled, “as it is—er—getting late. …”
“You aren’t going?” said Molly concerned.
“Certainly Mr. Finch is going,” said Mrs. Waddington: and there was that in her demeanour which suggested that at any moment she might place one hand on the scruff of his neck and the other on the seat of his trousers and heave. “If Mr. Finch has appointments that call him elsewhere, we must not detain him. Good night, Mr. Finch.”
“Good night. Thank you for a—er—very pleasant evening.”
“It was most kay-eend of you to come,” said Mrs. Waddington.
“Do come again,” said Molly.
“Mr. Finch,” said Mrs. Waddington, “is no doubt a very ba-husy man. Please go upstairs immediately, Molly. Good na’eet, Mr. Finch.”
She continued to regard him in a manner hardly in keeping with the fine old traditions of American hospitality.
“Ferris,” she said, as the door closed.
“Madam?”
“On no pretext whatever, Ferris, is that person who has just left to be admitted to the house again.”
“Very good, madam,” said the butler.
IV
It was a fair sunny morning next day when George Finch trotted up the steps of Number 16, Seventy-Ninth Street, East, and pressed the bell. He was wearing his dove-grey suit, and under his arm was an enormous canvas wrapped in brown paper. After much thought he had decided to present Molly with his favourite work, Hail, Jocund Spring!—a picture representing a young woman, scantily draped and obviously suffering from an advanced form of chorea, dancing with lambs in a flower-speckled field. At the moment which George had selected for her portrayal, she had—to judge from her expression—just stepped rather hard on a sharp stone. Still, she was George’s masterpiece, and he intended to present her to Molly.
The door opened. Ferris, the butler, appeared.
“All goods,” said Ferris, regarding George dispassionately, “must be delivered in the rear.”
George blinked.
“I want to see Miss Waddington.”
“Miss Waddington
