A voice seemed calling in Brooke’s ears: “The last afternoon, when you all went sketching with the master, and after lunching in the woods you overtook the brotherhood of Clichy (as Lorenz’s coterie was called). Farther on and apart you found him alone, with head bent. You thought he was asleep and dropped the cool grapes in his hands, half as a trick, darting away again. Then good Madame Druz, the chaperon of the day, coming up, scolded you for ‘American imprudence,’ and finally that night you cried, half at her vulgar interpretation of a harmless act, and half because Lorenz never gave word or sign before your leaving. And because not a single flower of the mass that filled your railway carriage was from him, you let Lucy amuse herself all the way to Cherbourg by pelting officials with them at each station passed. He has painted you as you were!” cried the voice; “his face is as he might wish it to be.”
It required an effort on Brooke’s part not to cry out, “Hush! speak lower!” so real did the words seem.
“Good work, isn’t it?—though half a dozen of us here at home could do as well, if we had the atmosphere, you know,” said Ashton’s voice, sounding through the rush of waters that filled her ears. “The Senator boasts that he was the first to recognize the artist whom every one now applauds, and he paid a cool ten thousand for it, the man’s first important picture at that! The old man saw it in the new Salon, but it wasn’t for sale. ‘No, no, no,’ said the artist,—‘he had a superstition, a sentiment, a desire to keep it,’—but the Senator thought ‘Yes, yes, yes, the desire will decrease with time and—money,’ and so it did, for this fall, just as the Parkses were on the verge of leaving, the Senator doubled the first offer and Lorenz capitulated. Then, before the ‘brotherhood’ could borrow his ‘luck penny’ he disappeared somewhere in Normandy, they say, to study, out of the depressing sound of the pot-boiling of the Quarter. Half his friends were glad, Ridgeway wrote me, and the other half, being jealous, shrugged their shoulders and raised their eyes, groaning, ‘Another mad American!’
“I have it all down fine, you see, for the papers to-morrow,—great scheme! I had a Harvard chum that was, Tom Brownell, who won’t go the respectable pace his father set for him in finance, and has turned reporter, work it up. He wants news, and, plague it, it must be _true_ or he won’t touch it. Of course I don’t appear in it, but all the credit is socially mine, you see.