Part 2 (1/2)

”Clear out, friend guy. Can't you see you're in the way?”

She continued to take the tone she was trying to make second nature, since it was not first.

”That's something he wouldn't notice if a car was running over him. But please let me go. There's a quarter of an hour left on to-day, but I'll make it up some other time.”

She moved down the studio with as much seeming unconcern as if she didn't know that two pairs of eyes were following her. Picking her way between old English chairs with canvases stacked against their legs, past dusty brocade hangings, and beneath an occasional plaster cast lifted on a pedestal, she went out at the model's exit without a glance behind her.

Bob spoke only when she had disappeared.

”Listen, Hubert. I'm going to marry that girl.”

Wray stepped back to the front of the easel, flicking in a touch or two on the rough sketch of the Greek girl kneeling before Aphrodite.

”I was afraid you were getting some such bug in your head.”

Bob limped to a table on which he had thrown his hat and the stick that helped his lameness.

People at Marillo Park, where the Collinghams lived for most of the year, said that, with the wounds he had got while in the French army in the early days of the war, he had brought back with him a real enhancement of manhood. Having come through Groton and Harvard little better than an uncouth boy, his experience in France had shaped his outlook on life into something like a purpose. It was not very clear as yet, or sharply defined; but he knew that certain preliminary conditions must be met before he could settle down. One of these had to do with Miss Jennie Follett; and what Hubert called ”a bug in his head” was, in his own mind, at least, as vital to his development as his braving his family in going to the war.

That had been in the famous year when the American nation was trying to be ”neutral in thought.” ”I'm not neutral in thought,” Bob, who had only that summer left Harvard, had declared to his father. ”I'm not neutral in any way. Give me my ticket over, dad, and I'll do the rest myself.”

He got his ticket over, and fifteen months later, bandaged and crippled, a ticket back. On the return voyage he had as his companion a young American stretcher-man who had helped to carry him off the battlefield, and who, a few weeks later, nervously shattered, had joined him in the hospital. Wray, who, on the outbreak of war, had been painting in Latoul's atelier, had now got what he called ”a sickener of Europe,” and was glad to hang out his s.h.i.+ngle in New York. A New England man of Gallicized ways of thinking, he had means enough to wait for recognition, so long as he kept his expenses within relatively narrow bounds.

With his soft hat plastered provisionally on the back of his head, Bob leaned heavily on his stick.

”I've got to marry some one,” he said, as if in self-defense. ”I'm that kind. I can't begin fitting my jig saw together till I do it.”

Wray kept on painting.

”Why don't you pick out a girl in your own cla.s.s? Lots of nice ones at Marillo.”

”You don't marry girls just because they're nice, old thing. You take the one who's the other half of yourself.”

”I don't see that you're the other half of Miss Follett.”

”Well, I am.”

”Miss Follett herself doesn't think so.”

”She'll think so, all right, when I show her that she can't do without me.”

”Some job!” Wray grunted, laconically.

”Sure it's some job; but the bigger the job the more you're on your mettle. That's the way we're made.”

The artist continued to add small touches to the shadows of the Aphrodite cast as he changed his tactics.

”If you married Miss Follett, wouldn't your family raise h.e.l.l?”

”They'd raise h.e.l.l at first, and put a can on it afterward. Families always do.”