“I love it,” said Jane.
She sat down in an armchair and smiled up at André. She was beginning to feel that this bearded gentleman was really the boy that she had loved. The grandchildren seemed very far away. She felt a tremulous little sense of intimacy at the thought that this was André’s very own studio and that they were alone in it together.
“I do all my work here,” said André.
Jane gazed about her. The place looked very businesslike.
The armchairs were worn and the divan was covered with a frayed Indian rug and a heterogeneous collection of cushions that had seen better days. The tea-set was a little dusty. Jane felt, absurdly, that she would like to wash that tea-set for André!
“Would you like some tea?” he asked.
Jane shook her head.
“I can get it,” said André. “I live here, you know, a great deal of the time. I’ve a bedroom and a kitchen on the court.”
“I thought,” said Jane, “you had a house in Paris.”
“I have,” said André, “but my wife’s not often in it. I live there, usually, when she’s in town.”
His words made Jane think instantly of the older Duroys. Of Mr. Duroy, looking just like André, riding that tandem bicycle with his wife!
“André,” she said, “where is your mother?”
“She lives in England,” said André soberly. “Father died twenty years ago in Prague. Mother went back to my grandfather’s house in Bath.”
“The one you told me about,” smiled Jane, “in the Royal Crescent?”
“The same,” said André, answering her smile. “Mother’s seventy-three, you know. She’s very active. She breezes in here every few months and washes up those teacups!” He broke off abruptly. “Are you interested in sculpture?”
“I’m interested in yours,” said Jane.
Her eyes were wandering over the bronze and plaster and marble figures. They were charming, Jane thought. It was absurd of Cicily to call that Eve vieux jeu! It was absurd of Cicily to say—Jane rose suddenly from her chair. Her gaze on the bronze and plaster and marble figures had grown a little more intent. She walked the length of the room in silence. André’s nymphs and Eves and saints and Madonnas drooped on every pedestal. Soft limbs and clinging draperies met the eye at every turn. The charcoal sketches on the walls vaguely revealed the grace of feminine curves. There was a certain harem-like quality to André’s studio! Would she have noticed it, Jane wondered, if it had not been for Cicily’s cynical words in the Luxembourg Gallery? Why—it was an absolutely Adamless Eden! Except for André, of course.
“I must show you what I’m doing now,” he said suddenly. He turned toward the frame platform. “It’s a war memorial,” he explained, as he removed the cloth from the ambiguous form. “Isn’t she charming?”
She was charming. She was just that. Jane stared in silence at the unfinished figure—a lovely girlish angel, sheathing a broken sword over a young dead warrior. Angels should be sexless, thought Jane quickly. Over young dead warriors their wings should droop in pity, not in love.
“Isn’t she charming?” repeated André. “My angel?”
Who was she? Jane could not help thinking. It was one of those thoughts that you despised yourself for, of course.
“Yes,” she said doubtfully. “Yes, but—”
“But what?” smiled André.
“Not awfully—angelic.” Jane wondered, as she spoke, just why she felt that she must make her criticism articulate. It was part of the old fourteen-year-old feeling of intimacy, perhaps. The feeling that she always owed André the truth. He was smiling again a trifle ironically.
“A little earthy, you think, my angel?”
Jane nodded soberly.
“Perhaps you’re right,” said André cheerfully. “Some of my angels have been a little earthy, you know.”
Jane looked at André. She still had that funny feeling that she owed him the truth.
“That’s too bad,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said André. “I’ve liked them earthy.”
Jane could not quite respond to his comical smile.
“Wasn’t that—rather foolish of you?” she said slowly. She was beginning to feel a terrible prig! André was looking at her with a very amused twinkle in his shrewd brown eyes.
“Qui vit sans folie n’est pas si sage qu’il croít,” he said. “La Rochefoucauld said that, Jane. He was a very wise old boy.”
Jane’s glance had dropped before André’s twinkle.
“Yes,” she said slowly, “but—”
“But what?” said André again.
Jane’s eyes were on his hands. She had felt a little shock of recognition when she looked at them. Hands did not change as faces did, she thought. André’s were still the strong sculptor’s hands of his boyhood. Prig or no prig, Jane felt an inexplicable impulse to give André good advice.
“André,” she said solemnly, “you ought to snap out of all this. Leave Paris. Go out to the provinces and forget the earthy angels. You’ve still got twenty years ahead of you.” André was smiling at her very amusedly, but Jane was not abashed. “You ought to come back to the corn belt, André. I know that seems ridiculous, but it’s true. Come back to the corn belt and do a bronze of Lincoln. Spend a winter in Springfield, Illinois, and get to know the rail-splitter. It would do you good.”
He shook his head. “It’s not in my line,” he said. “I tried a bronze of Foch last year. I had a good commission, but I couldn’t get interested.”
“You would get interested,” urged Jane, “if you really worked at it. You get interested in anything you actually experience.”
Again André’s smile was very much amused. But rather tender.
“It’s thirty-four years since I last saw you, Jane,” he said. “What have you experienced?”
He had dismissed the subject. He spoke as if to a child. Jane suddenly felt very young and virginal, but just a little irritated.
“I’ve experienced Stephen,” she said briefly.
“That all, Jane?” asked André. Under his ironic eye Jane felt far from confidential. She succumbed to an impulse to dismiss a subject herself.
“Of course,” she said.
“I wonder,” said André gallantly. But the gallantry was not very convincing. He did not seem incredulous. Jane was not surprised. She
