“What is it, M. Lorenz?” Brooke had asked, smiling at his serious air; “no one ever tells me anything definite but you. The master says, ‘Good! keep on!’ One friend only grunts; some one else says ‘_Pas mal_.’ I know that I must work, work, work, but what do I most lack?”
Lowering his eyes almost to the grass itself, he spoke rapidly, as if the telling was a pain to him: “You have not yet had the awakening; for it you must wait; it is the same with me, but I may not dry my brushes to wait for the day, only work, and destroy, and work again, come good, come ill. It is not enough to block the form and lay on the colours truly. Unless you can interpret your vision and see its shadow on the canvas, watch it draw breath, move, and speak to you, you can never create. But first of all you must know and feel, even if you suffer. How can you interpret this woman before you? Never could you paint for what she stands. Try children, animals, anything else—or better, dry your brush and wait!”
Brooke had flushed angrily and answered curtly; even now the memory brought colour to her cheeks. Only once again had she seen Lorenz before leaving, and now two years had passed. What had become of him? There were depths in this woman’s nature that her parents, all devotion in their different ways, had never fathomed, of which her friends of every day had never dreamed; and in one of these secret places, all unconscious to herself, this man had gained sufficient place at least to bar all others.
While she was thus dreaming away the afternoon, the concert being ended, the throng pressed toward the gallery, and the confusion of voices, high in key and surging on, brought Brooke quickly to herself. Rising, she turned over the pages of the catalogue, reading the artists’ names, and sauntered down the line to where the numbers began, nodding occasionally, or saying a few words to friends that came up; some of whom were stopping to see the pictures, others merely noting the scenic effect of the whole. Suddenly she halted so abruptly, her fingers gripping the page between them with noticeable tension, that a man behind nearly fell over her, while her eyes fastened on the letters that said, “24: Eucharistia. M. Lorenz. 1901.” Before she could read the details opposite, the man whom she had stopped, Charlie Ashton (now Carolus, cousin to Lucy Dean and a courtesy artist possessed of a popular studio for concerts) looked over her shoulder and said:—