“You say that as if you’d like to add, ‘Here, my pore gel, take this quarter and wear a cap the next time you meet me!’ Wait—wait until you fail.”
Thurley’s spirit was roused. “But I won’t—not in my work.”
“There are other ways than work—love, for instance?”
“I won’t fail in love,” the defiant, wild-rose Thurley was always on hand to meet a challenge.
“Don’t promise yourself everything,” was Polly’s sage advice, “and now, I believe we are ready to decamp.”
She found Collin’s place more than Polly said, since Polly viewed it through adoring eyes and was blind to tiny flaws.
Their approach was anything but conventional. They had raced up from the station, Polly winning by a nose, hilarious young persons with flushed faces.
They found the famous Collin, in an artist’s smock of gray chambray, sweeping off his front steps! Upon seeing them, he called out,
“Cook left last night with a case of champagne—there are all the dishes to wash ... and the boy left yesterday morning with my two best suits—oh, ho, art is merely incidental,” continuing his sweeping in vigorous fashion.
Then he dropped the broom and came down the walk to meet them.
His garden had the air of age and mystery. The famous statue of Aphrodite attributed to Praxiteles was in a monolith of white marble lined with brass and surrounded by a small fountain which paid her homage. As soon as midsummer came, he explained to Thurley, there would be yellow lilies with heavy sweetness, the clean fragrance of shy heliotrope, creamy, bending tassels of spiræa forming an aisle up to the white stucco house with its contrasting dark, wooden trimmings.
But when they entered the hall, Thurley gasped with amused dismay, for she had seldom seen such conglomeration and disorder. It was true there were pink marbleized walls, tall lapis lazuli pillars capped with gold and an emerald malachite cornice with a black baseboard in the big studio. In addition to the collection of rare eighteenth century furniture with needlepoint chairs and blue and silver hangings, the growing plants and endless bird cages filled with twittering English bullfinches, there were strewn carelessly rare Greek vases and Etruscan fragments, an ugly easel and modelling stand, spotted canvases carelessly lying about. On chairs, but more often on the floor, were jars of brushes, rare lithographs by Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes’ drawings, Meryon’s etchings and Conder’s painted silks. Half finished portraits and charcoal outlines of figures were pinned relentlessly on the walls, and a shaggy Airedale answering the name of Fencer came muzzling the guests in suspicious welcome and walked without concern on all of the treasures.