The Making of Camilla

I

IF her good sister-in-law Rachel had not backed her up, Camilla would never have attained her independence in the face of the family phalanx. Though she had been living with her aunt for seventeen years, and had not been beholden to her brothers and sisters, and at nine and twenty was discreet enough to be her own mistress, still these elderly relatives, the two sisters and their husbands, and the three brothers and their wives, all old enough to be her aunts and uncles, were united in regarding her as an immature and unprotected female, who could not with propriety live alone, especially as with her small independent means and gentle self-sacrificing nature, she would be a most desirable addition to any one of the five bustling, prosperous households. But Camilla had served her time with her vain and captious aunt, and now dreamed of freedom. That gorgeous old woman had died, and her fair income had reverted to her late husband’s estate. She had been able to leave her niece only the houseful of furniture of a kind nobody wanted, and cupboards full of splendid raiment that the modest girl would probably never make use of.

Camilla bent to the family arguments like a reed to the current, but after all was said, she found herself serene and secure in her own purpose. With the smallest and least shiny of her aunt’s things she furnished a flat, and attained a home of her own, and a qualified independence, for she could hardly escape, nor did she want to, the many demands of a large family circle.

To each sister impartially she gave a piece of the fine lace; to each of the sixteen nephews and nieces a bit of pretty silver as a memento of their great aunt; other things were sold. When all was settled, aside from what she kept, she found her inheritance amounted to just twentythree hundred dollars in money.

With the familiar old things about her Camilla kept the continuity of her life unbroken. She looked round her little parlor with satisfaction in its simple, oldfashioned, almost conscious quaintness, which was not at all that of revived mahogany and Colonial effects, but of the homelier black-walnut day of the midnineteenth century, freed of its atrocities. Camilla herself had always been called homely by her relatives, and she was certainly old-fashioned. As a child she had been thin and angular, eager and absentminded by turns, and as a woman she was tall and thin and pale, with gentle, pretty gray eyes, and an abundance of fine light brown hair which she had always tried to believe was blond. It was the only feature her sisters had ever envied her.

She had lived more with old people than with youth, for her aunt had absorbed her, to the exclusion of intimacies with the nephews and nieces who were near her own age. She knew her Jane Austen by heart, and she lived leisurely with Trollope when other young persons were rushing breathless from one latest “seller” to the next; and Christina Rossetti was an unshared pleasure, Emily Dickinson a secret joy, in a circle oblivious to the charms of poetry.

For all the worldliness of her aunt, and the matter-of-fact ways of her other relatives, demure as she appeared, Camilla Weddleton concealed a delightfully romantic nature. For one thing her family name seemed to her impossibly ugly, and like any maiden of Jane Austen she dreamed of the Prince Charming who should turn up to change it. He was to be unlike any of the eligible men she knew, for Camilla was a virgin curiously afraid of the male of her species. A man of business, she decided, and the family acquaintance almost without exception were men of business, could never satisfy her, for business and poetry seemed to be incompatible, and a love of poetry was one of her touchstones. She knew there were men who liked poetry, for there were men who wrote about it, and lectured about it, there were even men who wrote it, though she did not want one of them; the most possible fulfillment of her ideal rested in a professor on a small salary, which her little income was to eke out, in the classic shades of a college town.

It was not true to say that she had never met a man who might satisfy this ideal, for several times had she met such; but, alas, he was always middle-aged, married, with a wife and family, and somehow it was these very impediments that disclosed the man’s worth. Poor Camilla seemed to herself to have come too late into the world; all the safe, sedate, thoughtful men appeared to be of an earlier generation.

The first week in April, after she was settled in her new quarters, in an ebullition of unheard-of extravagance that set the family tongues to wagging, — and with a telephone in each house the discussion of family events brooked no delay, — Selina, one of the sisters-in-law, asked Camilla to be her guest in Chicago for a week of Grand Opera. “That is,” Selina hedged, “four operas; for of course it would be more than I could stand to go every night. If you wished to go more often I would n’t keep you home.” Selina was the invalid of the family, but of the sort who could rise from her bed to attend the play.

II

Anything must be an anticlimax after that first night’s experience, Camilla was sure. She had throbbed for hours in the darkness of her room after it, and now the next morning she was still floating in a world undreamed of. Her aunt had detested German opera, so that during the winter visits in New York Camilla had never heard “ Tristan and Isolde.” Selina was spending her morning in bed, and Camilla had crossed in the bright April sunshine, which even Chicago smoke could not rob of all its gold, to the Art Institute near the hotel, for some long rich hours alone with the treasures of that admirable museum, so beautifully housed, so well lighted, well ordered, well chosen, and generously dowered. She walked through all the galleries for a general survey, for she intended in her conscientious manner to spend there part of each morning of her visit, and to study carefully the different collections, to make her outing profitable in art as well as in music.

In the south galleries she found the spring exhibition of paintings by local artists, and thinking to leave it until the last as least important, to visit only after she had satisfied herself with the bronzes and sculptures, and the great French paintings, she was passing out with a cursory glance here and there, when her attention was caught by a sunny canvas,— green leaves, yellow lights, transparent purple shadows, and delicious pale blue in summer sky, and in the frock dappled with sunlight of a little girl reading out of a blue fairy book. But more than charm of color and line drew Camilla to the picture, more than subject and story told, and she approached it with palpitating curiosity, for something had struck her from half across the room, and she could hardly believe that it would not disappear upon closer examination. Who was this enchanting little girl, with her pale, eager, imaginative face and heavy hair, her sharp elbows and thin legs, curled up under an apple-tree, her child-heart wholly given to her Prince Charming, and alike unconscious of the painter-man, or humming bee, or even of the long shadows of imminent tea-time. It seemed to Camilla the very image, the very body and soul of herself of twenty years before. But who carries years about ? We are eternally ourselves to ourselves, and Camilla did not have to put herself back, it simply was herself as she knew herself, and all the pale sweetness and blueness and purity of the picture was the very color of her life. She studied the face minutely; it was exactly her own as she knew it in faded photographs, and as she always imagined she had looked. It was not the painting of a sunny orchard with a little girl in it, it was the presentment of a quite particular, individual, unforgettable little girl, with an accessory of orchard, book and summer sky.

Other people passed in and out of the room, and Camilla moved about not to attract attention by her absorption, but she saw only one picture from different angles, and listened only for comments on that one canvas. Camilla had no doubt; it was the clou of the exhibition; the most beautifully composed, the best painted, the freshest vision; and when the discerning came to it, it won instant praise; and such pleasant praise, Camilla thrilled to it. Poor, plain, homely, lonely, orphaned Camilla, all of whose beauty was of the spirit, how she had pitied her own unappreciated childhood; for she knew in her heart that she had been an adorable child, if there had been any one beside her mother fine enough to adore her, — gentle, dainty, dreaming, gay; all spirit when the spirit is wonderful in its innocence. And now to be appreciated! The blood flew back and forth from her face to her heart. One little plain figure in a short skirt, evidently an artist from her intelligent criticisms, a vivid, dark, bright-eyed creature, seized her companion’s arm, a slow-moving, middle-aged woman in black. “There,” she cried, “see what he has come to! Is n’t that wonderful ? Are n’t you glad we know him, are n’t you proud? Why, these others paint with the earth, with mud; he paints with sunshine and light. Arrived ? Well, I guess! Don’t you feel like crying ?”

“Oh, Addie, how you do run on!”

“Run on ? I guess I am fixed here for all time. You can run if you like. I knew it would be fine, but really!" She approached, and gloated over the canvas with her short-sighted eyes; she walked backwards from it. Her companion seated herself resignedly on the bench in the centre of the room, and abandoned the little woman to her enthusiasm.

“If that is n’t the spirit, the soul, the heart, the very essence of childhood, I would like to know! And such brush work, — it is as easy and free as if his hand could n’t go wrong. If I see him I know what I shall do; I shall hug him.”

Camilla flushed scarlet at this, and turned her back on the little woman, who after all was no younger than she. That mysterious “he” back of it, — who, what, was he ? She had begun by falling in love with the picture, and now it was dreadfully complicated with this “ he” who was its author, who could so pluck out the pure heart of mystic girlhood.

“Of course,” said Camilla bitterly to herself, “he is married, and this child is his daughter, whom he paints so wonderfully; only a father ever loved a homely little girl so much.”

“After the too, too solid English children of the Christmas annuals, is n’t it a relief to get this dear, ethereal, lovable creature, who is infinitely more plastic ?” said the enthusiast to her companion.

“It is nice; but I won’t be late to lunch, Addie, and if we are to get out to Winnetka by one — ” The large figure rose.

“Oh, bother these lunch parties!” cried Addie, tearing herself from her friend’s triumph.

Camilla went out into the next gallery after them, too much excited to stay longer with her portrait; “too much of a fool,” as she put it to herself. She would try to think of something else. Nordica’s voice was still echoing through the chambers of her soul. That after that tremendous first act there could have been heights unscaled and depths unsounded! How curious that Art can unlock such extraordinary capacities for emotion. Demure, self-contained, old-fashioned, apparently prim Camilla had lived through that extremity of passion, and made it all potential to herself. She imagined her proper self in a gorgeous Gothic abandonment of love. She sat down in the next room, but her eyes were unable to take in anything, and she found herself watching to see who went into and who came out of the adjoining gallery. There were not many visitors that morning. Almost unconsciously she got up after a little and went back, silly as she felt, for she must hear what was said about the girl. She had been with the picture but a few minutes when a tall dark man with French-cut beard, without hat in hand, so possibly a painter or teacher in the Institute, came with a short, round, rosy-faced, spectacled young man, and led him directly to the picture. “There, now don’t say that is ‘clever,’ for it is n’t. He never brought that home from Paris, he took it over with him and he did n’t lose it in Paris. That’s simon-pure American. That’s our note, — clean, delicate, iridescent, transparent, sunny, the inside of a shell, the flash of an opal; just as pure as that child he has painted.” He looked at the jolly round face for approval.

“Bully!” the good-natured lips pronounced.

“Do you want me to batter your head ? Pump for something.”

“It’s great!”

The elder man shrugged his shoulders in despair, with the old gestures picked up in Paris. “You never could talk, but you can write. I tell you, I am proud. I have had a lot of nice industrious ducks, but he is my first and only ugly duckling.

I still claim him: he knew a thing or two before he went to Paris.”

They discussed the technique, they compared it with this and that on the walls about, all in a flash, for their morning evidently held other duties beside the study of one picture; and then they were off.

A very splendid, white-haired lady hovered behind the men during their talk, glancing at the picture through her tortoise-shell lorgnettes, and dropping occasional words to her companion with the catalogue, whose neat self-effacement bespoke a salary. “Go and find out how much it is. That is safe to buy, and it is a darling. Mr. Clemmer for once will approve of my accession. Don’t be stupid.” The companion was turning over her catalogue.

“But please, I must be sure of the number.”

When the woman returned, Camilla passed as near to her as she dared, but the grand white lady with the thick lips was not one to be conscious of any one but herself. " Well?” she demanded.

“It was eight hundred, but it is sold,” the companion said.

“Provoking! If they knew who wanted it now, I should have to double the price. I shall have him do something for me. Let me see, you have his name?” The ladies passed on.

Camilla felt as if she were being bought and sold. No one ought to have it but herself, and how ridiculous for one to want a picture of one’s self; but who else was there to care for it ? She looked at her watch ; her time was up, Selina would be dressing, and would want her to talk to. But that name ; she sought the woman at the desk for a catalogue, and turned the leaves with trembling fingers, quite conscious of her nervousness, and saying, “What a goose I am!” No. 408, A Fairy Stony. Walford Deane, Chicago. “‘Deane ; ’I had n’t thought of the last name having an ‘n.’ Walford is n’t very pleasant, but still it is n’t common. I rather like the combination.”

Camilla was almost run over by an electric cab as she crossed the broad avenue ou her way back to the Annex, she was so preoccupied picturing Walford Deane on the background of thirty-two violins divided into eight parts, pouring out waves of passion, against which all the events of the morning had been projected.

III

This was on Tuesday; by Friday Camilla had made up her mind. She decided she was quite over the sillies, and that the preposterous imaginings about “him” in which she had indulged for a few brief romantic hours were only a youthful freak unworthy of a sedate woman. Still, she did not consider that a sojourn in an expensive hotel, in a whirl of glittering movement, with seductive music every night, — for Selina had succumbed to temptation, and literally risen to the occasion, and they had missed no performance,—was not conducive to modest and prudent meditation. Each morning Camilla had visited her picture, and in an atmosphere where all the world seemed to have every last whim gratified, she came to believe that if she could not possess the adorable little girl, she had a sort of right to possess its equivalent. She never had had what she wanted, she had never expressed herself, no one really knew her or appreciated her; why should she not seize her opportunity, regardless of the scorn of the bristling family phalanx headed by Sister Mary Toler ? Her absence from them gave her a reckless courage. If no one had ever admired her, all the world should be made to admire her effigy: she would be some one for once, some one forever, and she would be beautiful.

Before her visit to the gallery, while Selina still slept, Camilla composed the following letter.

WALFORD DEANE, ESQ.

My dear Sir: I am captivated by your painting of a child in the exhibition at the Institute, and would very much like a picture by you. Are you in the way of painting a portrait at present, and if so, may I ask what would be your fee? I shall be here until Sunday afternoon; after that please address me at 404 Spring Street, Blaireau. Very sincerely,

(Miss) CAMILLA WEDDLETON.

How she hated to subscribe that last name; it was enough to prejudice an artist against her.

Saturday brought no reply, and it was not until Sunday noon when she returned from church that a special delivery letter was handed to her.

MY DEAR MISS WEDDLETON:

Thank you very much for your kind words about my picture, I am glad you like it. I like it, too! I wish I were a portrait painter, and could say straight off that I would be charmed to paint a portrait for you, but portraits are n’t really going to be my line, and I fear I should dreadfully disappoint you. If you want to run the awful risk of buying a picture in the dark which may never satisfy you, I will honestly try to please myself, the only person I can sincerely aim to please, but I am ashamed to say I should have to ask you two thousand dollars for my work. I would n’t advise you to run the risk!

As you see. I am in Blaireau. I am with my cousin Deane Chorley for Sunday. If you care to have me stay over Monday, please wire me at 226 Southern Ave.

Camilla read this over with flushed face in the privacy of her own room. Every word satisfied her, the modesty, the frankness, the touch of humor; and even the price did not daunt her, for of course the painter of A Fairy Tale could afford to double his price. He was sure to be the kind to detest fashionable portrait painting, he knows he is great, and won’t conform to any standard but his own. Why should n’t she use her aunt’s bequest as she liked, even if it were almost a tenth of all she possessed in the world? She would see him anyway; and before lunch time she secretly flew to the office and sent a dispatch to Walford Deane.

When her letter had reached him at his cousin’s, — and it was not the first demand for a portrait since the exhibition had opened,— Deane asked, “Who are the Weddletons?”

“A large family here, and mostly rich, I believe,” replied his cousin. “Two have a wholesale grocery, and one is a lawyer.”

“Do you know Miss Camilla Weddleton ? ”

“No, I don’t.” Chorley was a recent comer to Blaireau, a flat dweller, and just beginning his fortune. “Matey,” he called to his wife in the front room, “do you know Miss Camilla Weddleton ?”

“Yes, slightly, she is in the ‘Guild of Needlewomen,’” replied Mrs. Chorley from the depths of the Saturday night’s society column, which she read as she swung herself back and forth in a cherry rocker, punctuating her reading with chocolate creams from the box at her elbow, which her guest had brought home for her.

“What is she like?” Deane asked.

“Oh, she is a tall, thin old maid, who wears a lot of hair, a sort of Boston type,” replied Matey who saw life from the view point of three-and-twenty.

“Is she rich ?”

“She inherited all her aunt’s money, and there was no one in St. Jude’s Church more handsomely gowned than that white-haired old woman; she must have been rich.”

“What does she want of a portrait? ”

“Her portrait? It must be her aunt’s; the old lady was stunning. She must have money to burn if she wants a painting of herself.” The rocking continued, and the hand went out for another chocolate.

“I won’t paint from a photograph,” exclaimed Deane grandly.

“Come off!” laughed Chorley. “You talk as if you were a millionaire. Charge a good round sum, and paint anything they ask for: the higher your price the more they will think of you. It is a game of bluff. Of course the old woman left a sum to have her picture done. What are you working for, glory ? Glory is glory only when it pays, my dear boy, and nowadays nothing pays better.”

Walford was not a prig and he did not try to explain the ideals of art to his business cousin. The eight hundred dollars from A Fairy Tale in his pocket, and the praise from quarters he respected, had made him a trifle “ cocky.” He felt quite superior to fashionable patronage, and he rather hoped Miss Weddleton would not order a portrait.

Monday morning Camilla flew about dutifully to the sisters, though they were too busy to pay much attention to her, so that she might have her afternoon free. She felt as guilty as if she were plotting an awful crime, instead of an awful folly, and she wondered how she would survive the family scenes that it would bring upon her.

At noon she arranged her hair carefully, and put on her best black frock; but after she was quite ready, on the stroke of dinner time, she told Augusta to keep things hot, and flew up to her storeroom where all her colored dresses were packed away, and pulled out a dark blue soft silk that she used to think particularly becoming, and came down and hurriedly slipped into it. She felt Augusta’s eyes boring through her as she served the dried chops, and she knew Augusta’s ears would hear a man’s voice later on, and draw her own inferences.

Deane sensibly came to his business engagement early, and in the simple arrangements she had instituted for her modest ménage, Camilla admitted him herself. His “prehensile eyes” seized instantly the old-fashioned effect of the exceedingly simple, cheerful little parlor, with its pots of pale primulas and snowy cyclamen in the window, and the harmony between it and its slender, delicate mistress of the heavy hair; but they could not blink the tall panel photograph,in an expensive silver frame, of the wonderful aunt in all her trappings, which stood on the table, a picture taken for an album of the “Descendants of Colonial Courts,” which of all Aunt Camilla’s counterfeit presentments, and they were not few, had most richly satisfied that lady ’s ideal of a high-born dame.

Camilla was not prepared for the closecropped, square-jawed youth who presented himself, and who appeared to her startled vision as certainly several years her junior: a stocky, strong-shouldered, brown-haired, blue-eyed man, who carried not a trace of Paris in manner or dress, nor even of cosmopolitan Chicago. He might rather have played football in a Western university, and been a hero of battle.

He waited for her to strike the first note as he settled back quietly in one of Aunt’s capacious, round, black-walnut chairs, without letting his prehensile eyes wander too inquisitively. He decided directly that it was the aunt whose portrait was desired for some woman’s club-room; it probably had been arranged for in her will; for he doubted from the look of the flat if Miss Weddleton had inherited the fortune Mrs. Chorley supposed; he had discovered that Matey’s suppositions were often beyond the mark; and as his hostess sat against the sheer white drapery of the window, with its pale primulas, he thought how much more he would enjoy making a study of her than to try to make an ancestral Moroni out of the brocaded dame of the panel photograph.

And Camilla, who since the fatal Tuesday had been as it were shutting her eyes, and leaping wildly from roof to roof, wondering at each landing to find herself alive, now blindly prepared for a further plunge. How could she make it seem not only not unbecoming for a poor plain spinster to desire a portrait of herself, but quite simply sensible, a reasonable wish, devoid of fatuous vanity ?

“Do you think you can do it?” she mildly asked, implying that now he had seen her he might refuse if she were absolutely impossible; and after a timid glance into his steady, merry blue eyes, she turned with the color mounting in her face unconsciously toward the gorgeous lady in the silver frame.

Deane felt uncomfortable; it was not easy to hold to his art conscience before this gentle and timid woman; he was too good-hearted to betray the æsthetic innocence she naïvely offered him, along with her two thousand dollars. Hang it all! he said to himself, I will make a life-size effigy with every last lace flounce and diamond ring, and put in all the white pompadour, and do what I can to resurrect the dead. “ I feel sure you could find some one who could do it better than I,” he answered, thinking to be modest.

Poor Camilla! this seemed the last prick to the seven days’ bubble floating in a rainbow light. Now he saw her, he did not want even to try; she was too plain, too faded, there was too little left of the dreaming child, to make even a bait of two thousand dollars attractive. She could hardly keep back the tears. Deane saw the lips quiver, and marveled at the tender heart: that she could care so much for the vain old woman!

“Oh, if you really want me to try, I will, only I never have tried to make a live person from a photograph; they touch out all the lines, you know, and the expression to begin with is usually the acme of self - consciousness. You have the dress, I suppose. She must have been exceedingly handsome,” he added, to be nice.

Suddenly the glittering object upon which their eyes were both glued swam into focus, and Camilla saw what Deane meant. But after all, this new revelation was no comfort, for the other idea, that she should want to be painted, had been so impossible, it never even had occurred to him. Of course it was natural she should want a picture of her beautiful aunt, and for the minute the silver frame glowed like a door of escape; in a flash she thought, that of all uses for her inheritance, this would have most pleased her aunt. How did it happen that colorless photography had ever satisfied that spirit which had worshiped for so many years at the shrine of her own chromatic splendor? In a sudden relief, as of a freed spring, Camilla jumped to this turn of fate. Had not the Ladies’ Club begged for a portrait of their first president ? She found herself alive after the last leap, and now she plunged again. “She was handsome, and I have the dress; ” there was almost fervor in the words as she took the picture into her hands, and turned it to the light. Quite unmitigated, it was truly the whole of the aunt she had suffered from, — all the endless vanity, the voluble pride in plain ancestors of whom they knew nothing but bare names and empty dates; and here was the mounting passion for display on platforms at meetings; while the homely everyday side of her aunt the photograph had left out, the side that made life jog on with no rapture of love perhaps, but with genuine affection and kindly tolerance. A portrait of this human side, in which, Camilla fancied, her aunt was kin to her dear mother, might have been a treasure that each year would have enhanced as the trials over the vanity faded away, and the happy hours of companionship and service asserted themselves in the memory; but to perpetuate the silly passion for display ? — never! Camilla’s good sense rebelled; besides, if Mr. Deane did not want to do it, why should she insist ? Perhaps he might after all be a little sorry to lose his two thousand, and she just then rather wanted him to feel sorry about something. After longer study of the picture, she added calmly, “I will accept your decision, if you think it so hard to do; no matter, this photograph is excellent. I don’t believe you could improve on it. I know how real artists hate to be asked to paint such things. Let us say no more about it.” She turned and put the picture back in its place. “But the little girl was lovely; tell me about her.”

Deane did feel a bit queer at being suddenly dropped so hard, and his superior phrases rang oddly in his ears. His eight hundred dollars did n’t seem such a fortune, after all. This slender lady had a quick decision that surprised him. Now that she saw him she evidently did nol trust him, and was glad to be free of her offer. “Oh, the little girl,” he said lamely.

“I not only like the painting,” Camilla hastened to put in, “but she reminded me of a child I know. Who is she ?” As she spoke, she turned again toward her aunt’s picture in the shy manner she had.

Deane’s trained eyes saw something then, and he wondered why he had n’t seen it before. “She was charming,” he said, “a little rustic nobody had discovered. The mothers offered me their beauties, and could n’t comprehend why I should put Letty, as they said, into a picture, It was in New Jersey last summer I made the studies, but I finished the picture during the winter. I paid her five cents an hour to sit, and then I was afraid I was spoiling her, for she could n’t understand why she should take money for doing what she most liked to do, especially after I gave her the Blue Fairy Book.” A smile teased his lips as he spoke.

Camilla’s face was averted, drooping slightly forward, a shadow falling on her cheek from the heavy hair. “She was so like the child I know that I was fascinated,” she said, lifting her eyes to his. “Have n’t you another study of her?”

“I could make one,” he replied, “but she is older now, and it is hard to do just the same thing over again.” He smiled as he said this, a frank, kind smile, Camilla thought.

“ Were you long in Paris ?” she asked, suddenly veering off from the painting.

“Three winters, and the summers down in the country.”

“But you had worked a lot before you went?”

“My father is an engraver in Kansas City. I have worked with him since I was a boy, and then I studied four years in Chicago at the Institute before getting to Paris.”

“And you like to paint children especially ?”

“I like to paint anything that is beautiful. It is a waste of time to do anything that is n’t just the very most beautiful and lovely thing an artist can possibly imagine.”

“Oh, did you think that of her?” Camilla exclaimed.

“I thought only a delicate, imaginative little girl fitted into the freshness and purity of that blue June day in the orchard, as no grosser spirit possibly could, when every color was young and transparent.” He paused a moment and then added, “I would like to make a study of the little girl grown up.” He smiled again, showing his splendid strong teeth.

Camilla flushed, and tried to maintain her dignity. “What do you mean?”

“You are the little girl grown up, only I fear you would scorn the kinship if you saw the Jersey farmhouse, and the faded blue print dress with a patch on the sleeve.”

Camilla thought of some lame pretense, of a niece, of a family resemblance, but what was the use? She looked up with her flushed face, and smiled back at him, “It did interest me.”

“And will you sit for me ? I can’t come until the end of May, though.”

IV

Sister Mary Toler could not quite make out how Camilla had scraped acquaintance with the artist. “There was a fancy picture in Chicago that she imagined looked like her as a child, though how it could I can’t see, for you never saw a homelier young one than she was. Was n’t it funny that she never took Selina to see it?”

“But Selina was probably in bed most of the time,” Rachel sensibly suggested.

“Now, somehow or other, the man wants her to pose for him: though what can he see in Camilla to put into a picture ?”

“You don’t do Camilla justice,” Rachel declared.

“I hope he does n’t think she has money,” Eliza Grass, the other sister, worried. “We ought to find out who he is.”

“I can trust Camilla,” said Rachel loyally. “I never knew any one so sensitive to men; if he were n’t good she could n’t stay in the room with him. She is n’t a child, you know.”

“Of course it flatters her to be asked,”Mary Toler said.

“I don’t see where Camilla got her romantic streak, certainly not from father or mother. Thank Heavens, none of us have it! Our grandmother Eustacia Spence, though, had Irish blood.” Eliza Grass could n’t abide things of the imagination.

“Well, so long as it does n’t cost anything, I don’t know as we can criticise,” Mary Toler summed up, “though it is a piece of folly to waste her time for a woman of Camilla’s age.” However young Camilla seemed to herself with her relatives, the relatives never allowed but that she was their contemporary.

Deane returned toward the end of May, and the sittings commenced. After extended explorations of the adjacent country to find a spot that pleased him for an out-of-door picture, he hit upon the back yard of a fisherman’s cottage, half a mile from the end of the trolley. Here a group of birches grew on the edge of the bluff and down the bank, their slender white stems veiled in a mist of tiny sharp blades, making a delicious screen against the pale cool blue waters of the lake. The old wrinkled Dalmatian woman, mother of the two lusty brown-skinned fishermen, hovered about her back door with kind, curious eyes. Communication with her was limited to dumb show, and to offerings of oranges, strawberries, pictures of the saints on gilt cards, and such trifles as Camilla’s imagination thought appropriate for a daughter of the Adriatic, stranded in old age upon these cold inland waters.

The picture was to be all atmosphere and sunshine, an arrangement of a slender, pale woman against the slender, pale birches, a blue gown blue water, and blue sky. The sittings consumed much time, for the journey out and back took nearly two hours. On dull days there would be no painting. Deane worked rapidly, for the warm days were unfurling the sharp leaves too fast for his purpose. At night the picture reposed in the shed where the Dalmatians kept their seines and oars, and here Deane was at it when the afternoon was rainy.

At the seventh sitting the painting was well along, and Rachel was allowed to inspect it. By this time the whole family had met the painter-man, dined him, and discussed him afterwards in and out, and up and down. Lindley voiced the family sentiment when he said of him that he was nothing like an artist. In other words Deane was discovered to be simply a manly sort of man, a discovery that said more of the social opportunities of Blaireau than of the tribe of Weddleton, or of the painter himself.

It was of a Sunday, when no sittings, or more literally, standings, were allowed, that Camilla was called to the telephone directly she came in from church, and an excited voice began “Miss Camilla,” — they had got that far in the course of conversations that had ranged widely and revealed many tastes; among others that she particularly disliked her surname; and that he had never heard of Emily Dickinson, and knew almost nothing about poetry, — “Miss Camilla, can you hear me ? I am at the saloon at the end of the trolley. Please, do you know, it is the most wonderful day, there was never one like it, and there will never be again ? There is a deep gray-blue luminous mist, most Japanese effect you can imagine, there is no horizon, the birches are transfigured. I have a new canvas, and am working like mad. Really, if you care for art you must sacrifice your principles, I must have you in this light. Won’t you, can’t you, please, come right off ? Get the one o’clock trolley.”

“Selina is expecting me to dinner.”

“Nothing can take precedence of this; the Queen does n’t make such a command once in ten years, once in a lifetime. Put a sandwich in your pocket, or don’t stop for it or you will lose your car; I have food here. Only, I pray, come, and come soon.”

“Shall I put on the blue dress?”

“You will come?” piped the telephone so as to be heard across the room.

He had worked like mad, and his football shoulders and neck had been given him to good purpose. It was an entirely new arrangement, everything simplified in the deep, diffused, wonderful blue light, and Camilla stood all the afternoon, beyond all endurance, consuming dry rye bread in the intervals of rest, for the cheese and butter were as impossible as the Dalmatian’s kitchen. Deane knew what he wanted, and he got it. At sunset the mysterious glassy water through the Japanese mist was laced with almost invisible bands of mauve, to be caught only unawares out of the corners of the eye. It was an unearthly day, and Camilla suffered a sea change into something rich and strange, — the spirit of woman, a something of purity and gentleness and heavenly innocence.

It was lucky that Lindley came for her in his auto, for she could hardly have walked to the cars. He was too good a brother to scold at her pale exhaustion, and none of the five sisters was with him, nor was there room for Deane to return with them.

When the two pictures were hung the next winter in the New York show the critics tried to lay them to this and that door, — he never could have done them without Whistler, said one; or Monet, said another; or Dagnan-Bouveret; or Aman-Jean; or Cazin; or Japan; but the more influences mentioned, the securer became Deane’s right to his own vision. That year there was nothing else to compete with them.

“It will spoil him,” said a wise man; “you will see him grind out his annual Lady of the Birches, for she is his wife now, you know.”

“I did n’t know. But for that matter how many types did Perugino, or Botticelli, or Luini, or Leonardo, or Rossetti perfect ? This is just as individual, — a type that seems to exactly express the artist. I am glad he has discovered her; she is adorable.”

“By the way,” said Walford Deane,— he was doing “just one more” arrangement of her in the New York studio,— “your aunt has never been enlarged; are n ’t you going to have it done ?” Camilla looked to see if he were teasing. “Did n’t she leave the money for it?”

“She left me just twenty-three hundred dollars, and all my fine feathers and furs,” replied Camilla, “which I never dreamed of wanting, as I never dreamed of being somebody in New York.”

Walford studied his wife’s face deliberately, and she could look at him now without blushing. “Camilla,” he said severely, “I wouldn’t have believed it of you if you had n’t confessed it with your own lips.”

“Confessed?” she said. “And it never occurred to you before?”

“Of you! That I was lured in my unsuspecting youth, trapped, ensnared, taken in ?”

She put her hand over his mouth, but he pulled it down. “You gambler, you dared to stake all! You did not want her portrait at all, not even at first!”

“ Be still, it was only your art; I was in love with myself,” she cried.

“You were in love with me, with me first, and I thought I had discovered you!”

Even John Milton would have been satisfied with her triumphant, “You did n’t discover me, Walford Deane, you made me!”