"You are disrespectful. I’m sure I could elevate the drama if I had the chance. But I sha’n’t get it. However, next to the stage I adore to paint," she explained. "There is a class. I have attended it for two years. I paint rather nicely."
"No wonder we feel so friendly," exclaimed Grismer.
"How _wonderful_! I’m simply mad to do something, too! Don’t you love the atmosphere of Bohemia, Mr. Grismer?"
He said that he did with a mischievous smile straight into her grey eyes.
"It is my dream," she went on, slightly confused, "to have a studio—not a bit fixed up, you know, and not frilly—but with just one or two wonderful old objects of art here and there and the rest a fascinating confusion of artistic things."
"Great!" he assented. "Please ask me to tea!"
"Wouldn’t it be _wonderful_? And of course I’d work like fury until five o’clock every day, and then just have tea ready for the brilliant and interesting people who are likely to drop in to discuss the most wonderful things! Just think of it, Mr. Grismer! Think what a heavenly privilege it must be to live such a life, surrounded by inspiration and—and atmosphere and—and such things—and listening to the conversation of celebrated people telling each other all about art and how they became famous! What a lofty, exalted life! What a magnificent incentive to self-cultivation, attainment, and creative accomplishment! And yet, how charmingly informal and free from artificiality!"
Grismer also had looked forward to a professional career in Bohemia, with a lively appreciation of its agreeable informalities. And the irresponsibility and liberty—perhaps license—of such a life had appealed to him only in a lesser degree than the desire to satisfy his artistic proclivities with a block of marble or a fistful of clay.
"Yes," he repeated, "that is undoubtedly _the_ life, Miss Quest. And it certainly seems as though you and I were cut out for it."
Stephanie sighed, lost in iridescent dreams of higher things—vague visions of spiritual and artistic levels from which, if attained, genius might stoop to regenerate the world.
But Grismer’s amber eyes were brilliant with slumbering mischief.
"What do you think of Grismer, Steve?" inquired Jim Cleland, as they drove back to Boston that night, where his father, at the hotel, awaited them both.