"Why, Milly, dear!" Mrs. Pendergast passed an incurious but observant eye over her acquaintance. "I thought you were in Aiken. What a lovely hat! Are you going to the Inghams? What will you wear? Isn't it restful here?"
Miss Darrow politely acquiesced and attempted replies, but her eyes strayed toward the Burnett portrait.
"Stunning," continued Mrs. Pendergast. "A new man just over. Quite too clever. Wonderful color, isn't it? Like a ripe pomegranate."
"No. He belongs to the Westchester Burnetts, though. Mrs. Hopkinson. So glad. Is Frederick here?"
The agreeable lady had made of the portion of the galleries in the neighborhood of the Burnett portrait a semblance of her own busy drawing-room. Other acquaintances came up and Miss Darrow was soon lost in the maze of small talk. A broad pair of shoulders were thrust forward into her group, and Miss Darrow found herself looking into a pair of quizzical gray eyes which were beaming a rather frank admiration into hers. "Miss Darrow--Mr. Burnett," Patricia Crabb was saying; and Millicent Darrow was conscious that in a moment the new arrival had quietly and cleverly appropriated her and was taking her to the opposite side of the room where he found for her a Winslow Homer of rocks and stormy splendor.
"Why is it," she asked, after her first enthusiasm, "that the work of the artist so seldom suggests its creator's personality?"
"The perversity of the human animal," he laughed. "That's the system of justice of the great Republic of Art, Miss Darrow. If we lose a characteristic here, we gain it somewhere else. Rather a nice balance, don't you think?"
"You hardly look the poet, Mr. Burnett--you don't mind my saying so?" she laughed. "And if you do dream, you do it with your eyes very wide open."
Mr. Burnett's brows were tangled in bewilderment. "I'm really not much given to dreaming. I'm rather busy, you know."
"It's splendid of you. You've worked long?"
"Er--yes--since I left college," he said, the tangle in his brows suddenly unraveling. A smile now illuminated his rather whimsical eyes. Miss Darrow found herself laughing frankly into them.
"Art is long--you must be at least--thirty."
"Less," he corrected. "Youth is my compensation for not being a lawyer--or a broker."