Under the Skylights Part 17

Daffingdon was a bachelor, and he was old enough or young enough for anything, being just thirty; and his sister Judith, who was some years his senior, sat behind his tea-urn on most occasions and made it possible for the young things of society to flutter in as freely as they willed.

The young things came to little in themselves, but some of them had vainglorious mothers and ambitious, pomp-loving fathers, and who could tell in what richly promising crevice their light-minded chatter might lodge and sprout? So Daffingdon and his sister encouraged them to come, and the young things came gladly, willing enough to meet with a break in the social round that was already becoming monotonous; and among the others came Preciosa McNulty,--dear little Preciosa, pretty, warm-hearted, self-willed----But we will wait a bit for _her_, if you please.

Daffingdon had spent many years abroad and still kept _au courant_ with European art matters in general; he knew what they were doing in Munich no less than in Paris, and letters with foreign postmarks were always dropping in on him to tempt his mind to little excursions backward across the sea. He kept himself more or less in touch too with the kindred arts, and readily pa.s.sed in certain circles for a man of the most p.r.o.nouncedly intellectual and cultivated type.

Thus, at least, Virgilia Jeffreys saw him. Virgilia herself was intellectual to excess and cultivated beyond the utmost bounds of reason; indeed, her people were beginning to wonder where in the world they were to find a husband for her. Not that Virgilia intimidated the men, but that the men disappointed Virgilia. They stayed where they always had stayed--close to the ground, whereas Virgilia, with each successive season, soared higher through the blue empyrean of general culture. She had not stopped with a mere going to college, nor even with a good deal of post-graduate work to supplement this, nor even with an extended range of travel to supplement that; she was still reading, writing, studying, debating as hard as ever, and paying dues to this improving inst.i.tution and making copious observations at the other. She too had her foreign correspondents and knew just what was going on at Florence and what people were up to in Leipsic and Dresden. She possessed, so she considered, a wide outlook and the greatest possible breadth of interests, and she knew she was a dozen times too good for any man she had ever met.

There were scores of other girls like her--girls who were forging ahead while the men were standing still: a phenomenon with all the fine threatenings of a general calamity. Where should these girls go to find husbands? Virgilia herself had been very curt with a young real-estate dealer, who was that and nothing more; and she had been even more summary with a stock-broker's clerk who, flas.h.i.+ng upon her all of a sudden, had pointed an unwavering forefinger toward a roseate, coruscating future, but who had finished his schooling at seventeen and had had neither time nor inclination since to make good his deficiencies. The first had just installed his bride in a house of significant breadth and pomposity, and the other, having detached himself from the parent office, was now executing a comet-like flight that set the entire town astare and agape.

"Well, that's nothing to me," said Virgilia disdainfully. "I couldn't have lived with either of them a month. I'm only twenty-six and I don't feel at all alarmed."

Then somebody or other had piloted her aunt Eudoxia toward the Temple of Art, and Eudoxia, after about so much of dawdling and of sipping and of nibbling and of gentle patronage and of dilettante comment and criticism through this studio and that, had opened up a like privilege to her niece. Together they had dawdled and sipped and suggested up one corridor and down another, and in due course they arrived at the studio of Daffingdon Dill, and presently they were as good as enrolled among the habitues of the place.

Eudoxia peered about among the tapestries and the sombre old furniture.

"Yes, there she is over in the corner with Preciosa McNulty." Then she looked back toward Dill and sighed lightly. "I wonder how this thing is coming out? I wonder how I want it to come out? And I wonder how much responsibility I must really bear for the way it _does_ come out?"

III

She handed back her cup to Dill. "What are those two girls giggling about?" she asked him.

Dill s.n.a.t.c.hed a moment from his cares as host. Little had he expected to hear Virgilia Jeffreys taxed with giggling.

Yet giggling she was,--with some emphasis and spirit too. She seemed to have slipped back from sedate and dignified young womanhood to mere flippant girlishness and not to have gained appreciably by the transition. Preciosa McNulty, still a girl and giving no immediate promise of developing into anything more, shared with her the over-cus.h.i.+oned disorder of the Persian canopy and giggled too.

Preciosa could laugh and chatter easily, volubly, spontaneously--all this, as yet, was the natural utterance of her being. But Virgilia was keeping pace with her, was even surpa.s.sing her. Yet she showed evidences of effort, of self-consciousness, of serious intention; now and then the _arriere pensee_ disclosed its puckered front.

This, and nothing but this, could excuse Virgilia to-day. For she was too old to giggle, far too learned, much too sober-minded. Dill himself felt this, and shook his head in reply to Eudoxia Pence's question, as he stepped away for a moment to accompany a pair of gracious amateurs to the door.

A little figure that was pa.s.sing rapidly along the corridor stopped on seeing the door ajar and waved a long supple hand and wagged a frizzly flaxen poll and gave a humorous wink out of his gray-green eyes and called unabashedly, before he resumed his skurrying flight:

"I've got 'em on the run, Daff; I've got 'em on the run!"

"Oh, that little O'Grady!" sighed Dill genteelly; "he is impossible; he will end with disgracing us. What can the fellow be up to now?" he wondered, closing the door, and preparing to return to his study of Virgilia Jeffreys.

"Your poor grandfather!--can't I fancy him!" Virgilia was saying to Preciosa. She gave a light dab at the other's m.u.f.f with her long slender hand. "Dear, puzzled old soul!"--and she crinkled up her narrow green eyes.

"Can't you?" Preciosa laughed back. "'I don't know anything about such things,' grandpa insisted. 'Go and see Mr. Hill, young man, or Mr.

Gibbons.' But the young man kept unrolling sheet after sheet. 'Grandpa,'

I said, 'we shall miss the whole of the first act.' Then the young man _had_ to go. He didn't want to, but he had to."

"The 'young man'!" laughed Virgilia, dandling a cus.h.i.+on. "Didn't he have any name?"

"Some queer one: Ig--Ig----I don't remember."

"Nor any address?"

"Some far-away street you never heard of."

"How ridiculous!" chirped Virgilia, throwing back her head. "Do let them give you another cup of tea or some more of those biscuits. Ask for what you want. Don't be backward, even if you are a newcomer."

"Dear me," said Preciosa; "don't tell me I'm bashful."

"Did his sketches amount to anything?" asked Virgilia, herself reaching for the biscuits.

"Well, there were plenty _of_ them. By a quarter to eight they had covered all the tables and chairs and about two-thirds of the floor.

There was every evidence of that young man's being after us--a regular siege. I have no doubt he was waiting outside all through dinner; he rang the bell the very minute poor unsuspecting grandpa turned up the gas in the front parlour. But that's nothing to the one just before him."

"What did _he_ do?" asked Virgilia, with all her fine blonde intentness.

Preciosa threw back her mop of chestnut hair. "Followed grandpa all the way home and would hardly let him have his dinner. He had it this time, however. And then, as I say, he turned up the gas; and then----"

"And then the shower began?" suggested Virgilia, putting her delicate eyebrows through their paces.

"The downpour. I never knew anybody to talk faster, or give out more ideas, or wave his hands harder,--like this." Preciosa cast her m.u.f.f away completely and abandoned her plump little fingers to unbridled pantomime.

"The room was peopled--isn't that the way they say it, peopled?--in no time; a regular reception. There were ladies in Greek draperies seated on big cogged wheels with factory chimneys rising behind, and strong young fellows in leather ap.r.o.ns leaning against anvils and forges, and there were----"

"I know, I know," declared Virgilia, ducking her head into her cus.h.i.+on, with the effect of suppressing a shriek of laughter. "And more 'ladies'

reading from scrolls to children standing at their knee. And all sorts of folks blowing trumpets and bestowing garlands; Commerce, Industry, Art, Manufacturing, Education, and the rest of them. Dear child! how good of you to call all these things 'ideas'! No wonder such novelties puzzled your poor dear grandfather!"

She clutched Preciosa's chubby little hand with her long white fingers, as if to squeeze from it an answering shriek.

But Preciosa contained herself. "And there was a lady engineer," she went on, after a short pause, "in a light blue himation--is that what they call it, himation?--and she was fluttering it out of the cab-window----"

"The Railway!" declared Virgilia, trying to laugh tears into her eyes.

"And one drawing showed a lot of Cupids nesting on top of a telegraph pole----"

"What did Jeremiah McNulty think of that?"

"--with their little pink heels dangling down just as cute----"

"In a bank!" cried Virgilia, in a perfect transport of merriment.

Preciosa, with whom a growing admiration for these abundant decorative details seemed to be overlaying her sense of fun, stopped in her account and then complaisantly gave forth the laugh that Virgilia seemed to expect.

"Oh, these young men!" exclaimed Virgilia, with a gasp and a gurgle to indicate that the limit was nearly reached; "these young men whom you never heard of, whose names you can't p.r.o.nounce, and who live you don't know where! They will be too much for your poor grandfather. Let him escape them while he can. He is too old and too busy for such annoyances.

Let him find some other young man whose name is known and whose studio is in a civilized part of the town and who has done some rather good work for some rather nice people." Virgilia crinkled up her eyes in a little spasm of confidential merriment and then opened them on her surroundings--the rich sobriety of the furniture; the casual picturesque groupings of "nice people"; the s.h.i.+ning tea-urn flanked by the candles in their fluted paper shades; the heavy gilded frames inclosing copies made by Dill in the galleries of Madrid and St. Petersburg; other canvases set against the base-boards face back so as at once to pique and to balk curiosity with regard to the host's own work; the graceful dignity of Dill himself, upon whom Virgilia's eyes rested last yet longest.

"I might mention Mr. Dill to grandpa," said Preciosa, with returning seriousness. This, her first intrusion into the strange, rich world of art, had rather impressed her, after all; such novel hospitality really required some acknowledgment.

"Do," said Virgilia, now in quite a gale. "Don't drink his tea for nothing! And if it's 'ideas' that are wanted," she went on, as she grasped Preciosa lightly by both shoulders and gave her a humorous shake, "this is the shop!"

Preciosa paused for a moment's consideration. She was not sure that Virgilia knew her well enough to shake her, nor had she supposed that Virgilia was giddy enough to shake anybody. Neither was she sure that what she most wanted was to ridicule the facile and voluminous sketches spread out so widely and so rapidly by that young man with the burning eyes and the quick, nervous hands and the big shock of wavy black hair.

Still, it was as easy to laugh as not to laugh; besides, which of the two might better set the tone, and authoritatively? Virgilia, surely; by reason of her age--she was some six or eight years the senior, by reason of her stature--she was several inches the taller, and by reason of her standing as an habituee--surely she must know how to behave in a studio.

So Preciosa tossed her pretty little head, and laughed, as she felt herself expected to.

"The shop, yes," she acquiesced gaily. "And if I come again----"