“By the way, why don’t you ’phone your mother to come? It’s going to be an awfully smart party. There’s a ’phone in the writing room or somewhere near—there always is one now at swell functions for the use of guests, and a young man (not a woman—too dangerous) from central to work it; they say the society reporters fight and bribe to get the job, they hear so much ‘inwardness.’ Your mother needn’t worry and stay at home. I don’t think your father’s sick. I heard daddy say last night that he is in another big deal, with trump cards enough to fill both hands, and he’s holding them so close for fear of dropping any that he’s bound to be preoccupied.”
“It’s time for us to go; I hear the music,” said Brooke, who had been set thinking by her friend’s talk.
“Why not come into the music room for a few numbers and then escape if you wish?” said Lucy, navigating the crowded stairs easily, and pausing on a landing to continue her chatter and glance into the room below. “What, all the chairs taken already? Just look at those orchids, by the dozen, not single, the whole plant hung by gilt chains from the ceiling!
“You won’t come? Well, so be it, if you have the ‘picture hunger’ as badly as you did in Paris. Do you remember the big hybrid French-English-Dutchman who gave that name to the moonstruck turns you used to have over painted ‘masterpieces’ and unpainted landscapes outdoors? Yes, I see you do. Well, I thought at one time he was painfully smitten and would probably lay himself down humbly at your feet, like an inconveniently thick bear rug that, failing to be able to step over, one must tread on, though often to one’s downfall. Still, of course, with artists the meaning of their looks and actions are usually either exaggerated or vague, much like their talk of values and colour schemes and atmosphere. I heard this same Marte Lorenz in a group of ravers standing before a canvas one day at the Mirlitons’ when I called for you, and I rubbered and peeped over their shoulders, expecting to see the portrait of a delicious woman at the very least; and what was the whole row about but an onion on a wooden plate, and they were saying that it was genuine and showed insight!
“It would be such fun to tease you, Brooke, if only you were teasable. Suppose, after all, there should be a real live man behind all this ‘picture hunger.’ I think that there must be from the way you have turned slack and dropped your brush in seeming disdain at your work, even after you won that Baumgarten prize, with the picture of your cousin Helen’s Mellin’s food babies sitting on the ground _au naturel_, eating cherries (pits and all), bless their poor fat tummies!