Where had that scene passed before her? “The Coming Storm near The Hague—E. Oliver (Salon, 1900),” said the catalogue.
“Ah!” Brooke exclaimed, half aloud. She remembered her first visit to the Salon, of standing before this same picture with Marte Lorenz, “the big hybrid English-Dutch-French artist,” Lucy Dean called him, and laughing at the solemn, stupid geese, while he had told her in his perfect, slow English that he had often driven flocks of geese to pasture in his boyhood, also that sometimes he had found them to be no laughing matter,—a trifling incident at the time, but now a sort of landmark in the receding journey.
She had met this Lorenz (Marte his intimates called him) often that winter and spring on the easy impersonal footing that prevails between the well-bred American woman and the art students of all countries. He had been presented to her mother most regularly at a fête in Ridgeway’s garden the autumn of their arrival, and from that moment until their parting, a year later, one thing had set him apart from all the score of men with whom she had come in close contact, men who blindly flattered, evaded, or temporized. He had always told her the truth about her work. If she had not realized it at the time, the conviction had always come to her sooner or later.
As to Lorenz himself, once a pupil of the Beaux Arts, his nationality prevented his striving for the Prix-de-Rome, and he had turned his work toward less classic lines; landscapes were his forte, the figure coming second, and yet he oftenest worked at figure-painting and conventional portraiture also, for he must have money for the pot-boiling, much as he disliked the necessity.
Farther away slipt the Whirlpool city and its surroundings. Once more was Brooke sketching in oils, with some friends who often went to the Carlo Rossi garden to pose for each other. Her subject was a girl of the Boulevards, nominally a flower seller. Successful in the drawing and colour, try as she might Brooke could not give the touch that should bring the lifelike expression to the face. With knit brows she looked up to see whose was the shadow cast on the grass before her. It was Lorenz, big, honest fellow, his hands clasped upon the back of the garden seat, his thatch of dark hair sticking out over his deep-set blue eyes, while a questioning expression involved in its uncertainty his straight nose, his deeply cleft chin, and the sensitive yet strong mouth that separated them. Even his short-cut mustache, which accentuated rather than concealed his lips, expressed doubt.