The Pioneer Women Trilogy: The Coast of Bohemia, Dr. Breen's Practice & Annie Kilburn. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ it! There's nothing there; I haven't decided what I shall do yet. I did think I should paint this tiger skin, but I don't feel easy painting the skin of a tiger I haven't killed myself. If I could get mamma to take me out to India and let me shoot one! But don't you think the whole place is perfect? I've tried to make it just what a studio ought to be, and yet keep it free from pose, don't you know?"

      "Yes," said Cornelia. "I've never seen a studio, before."

      "You poor thing, you don't mean it!" cried Charmian in deep pity. Cornelia said nothing, and Charmian went on with an air of candor, "Well, I haven't seen a great many myself—only two or three—but I know how they are, and it's easy enough to realize one. What I want is to have the atmosphere of art about me, all the time. I'm like a fish out of water when I'm out of the atmosphere of art. I intend to spend my whole time here when I'm not at the Synthesis."

      "I should think it would be a good place to work," Cornelia conceded.

      "Yes, and I am going to work here," said Charmian. "The great trouble with me is that I have so many things in my mind I don't know which to begin on first. That's why the Synthesis is so good for me; it concentrates me, if it is on a block hand. You're concentrated by nature, and so you can't feel what a glorious pang it is to be fixed to one spot like a butterfly with a pin through you. I don't see how I ever lived without the Synthesis. I'm going to have a wolf-hound—as soon as I can get a good-tempered one that the man can lead out in the Park for exercise—to curl up here in front of the fire; and I'm going to have foils and masks over the chimney. As soon as I'm a member of the Synthesis I'm going to get them to let me be one of the monitors: that'll concentrate me, if anything will, keeping the rest in order, and I can get a lot of ideas from posing the model; don't you think so? But you've got all the ideas you want, already. Aren't you going to join the sketch class?"

      "I don't know but I am," said Cornelia. "I haven't got quite turned round yet."

      "Well, you must do it. I'm going to have the class here, some day, as soon as I get the place in perfect order. I must have a suit of Japanese armor for that corner, over there; and then two or three of those queer-looking, old, long, faded trunks, you know, with eastern stuffs gaping out of them, to set along the wall. I should be ashamed to have anybody see it now; but you have an eye, you can supply every thing with a glance. I'm going to have a bed made up in the alcove, over there, and sleep here, sometimes: just that broad lounge, you know, with some rugs on it—I've got the cushions, you see, already—and mice running over you, for the crumbs you've left when you've got hungry sitting up late. Are you afraid of mice?"

      "Well, I shouldn't care to have them run over me, much," said Cornelia.

      "Well, I shouldn't either," said Charmian, "but if you sleep in your studio, sometime you have to. They all do. Just put your hat in here," and she glided before Cornelia through the studio door into one that opened beside it. The room was a dim and silent bedchamber, appointed with the faultless luxury that characterized the rest of the apartment. Cornelia had never dreamt of anything like it, but "Don't look at it!" Charmian pleaded. "I hate it, and I'm going to get into the studio to sleep as soon as I've thought out the kind of hangings. Well, we shall have to hurry back now," but she kept Cornelia while she critically rearranged a ribbon on her, and studied the effect of it over her shoulder in the glass. "Yes," she said, with a deep sigh of satisfaction, "perfectly Roman! Gladys wouldn't have done for you. Cornelia was a step in the right direction; but it ought to have been Fulvia.

      "'I should have clung to Fulvia's waist and thrust

       The dagger through her side,'"

      she chanted tragically; and she flung her arms about Cornelia for illustration. "Dream of Fair Women, you know. What part are you going to play, today?"

      "What part?" Cornelia demanded, freeing herself, with her darkest frown of perplexity. "You're not going to have theatricals, I hope." She thought it was going pretty far to receive company Sunday afternoon, and if there was to be anything more she was ready to take her stand now.

      Charmian gave a shout of laughter. "I wish we were. Then I could be natural. But I mean, what are you going to be: very gentle and mild and sweet and shrinking; or very philosophical and thoughtful; or very stately and cold and remote? You know you have to be something. Don't you always plan out the character you want them to think you?"

      "No," said Cornelia, driven to her bluntest by the discomfort she felt at such a question, and the doubt it cast her into.

      Charmian looked at her gloomily. "You strange creature!" she murmured. "But I love you," she added aloud. "I simply idolize you!"

      Cornelia said, half-laughing, "Don't be ridiculous," and pulled herself out of the embrace which her devotee had thrown about her. But she could not help liking Charmian for seeming to like her so much.

XVIII

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      They still had some time with Mrs. Maybough, when they went back to her before any one else came; Cornelia could see that her features were rather small and regular, and that her hair was that sort of elderly blond in color which makes people look younger than they are after they have passed a certain age. She was really well on in the thirties when she went out to Leadville to take charge of Charmian Maybough's education from the New England town where she had always lived, and ended by marrying Charmian's father. At that time Andrew Maybough had already made and lost several fortunes without great depravation from the immoralities of the process; he remained, as he had always been, a large, loosely good-natured, casual kind of creature, of whom it was a question whether he would not be buried by public subscription, in the end; but he died so opportunely that he left the widow of his second marriage with the income from a million dollars, which she was to share during her lifetime with the child of his first. Mrs. Maybough went abroad with her step-daughter, and most of the girl's life had been spent in Europe.

      There was a good deal of Dresden in their sojourn, something of Florence, necessarily a little of Paris; it was not altogether wanting in London, where Mrs. Maybough was presented at court. But so far as definitively materialized society was concerned, Europe could not be said to have availed. When she came back to her own country, it was without more than the hope that some society people, whom she had met abroad, might remember her.

      "You'll see the greatest lot of frumps, if they ever do come," Charmian said to Cornelia, after her stepmother had made her excuses to Cornelia for her friends being rather late, "and I don't think they're half as uncertain to come as mamma does. Anyway, they're certain to stay, after they get here, till you want to rise up and howl."

      "My dear!" said Mrs. Maybough.

      "Oh, I don't suppose I ever shall howl. I'm too thoroughly subdued; and with Cornelia here to-day I shall be able to hold in. You're the first Synthesis girl," she frankly explained to Cornelia, "that mamma's ever let me have. She thinks they spend all their time drawing the nude."

      Mrs. Maybough looked at Cornelia for the effect of this boldness upon her, and the girl frowned to keep herself from laughing, and then gave way. Mrs. Maybough smiled with a ladylike decorum which redeemed the excess from impropriety. Charmian seemed to know the bounds of her license, and as if Mrs. Maybough's smile had marked them, she went no farther, and her mother began softly to question Cornelia about herself. The girl perceived that Charmian had not told her anything quite right concerning her, but had got everything dramatically and picturesquely awry. She tried to keep Cornelia from setting the facts straight, because it took all the romance out of them, and she said СКАЧАТЬ