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

      "Where?" asked Wetmore. He looked at the ladies as if he thought one of them had been indicated.

      "How delightful to have one's ideas jumped on just as if they were a man's!" sighed Mrs. Rangeley. Her opponent laughed a generous delight, as if he liked nothing better than having his reasoning brought to naught. He entered joyously into the tumult which the utterance of the different opinions, prejudices and prepossessions of the company became.

      Ludlow escaped from it, and made his way to Mrs. Westley, in that remoter and quieter corner, which she seemed to find everywhere when you saw her out of her own house; there she was necessarily prominent.

      "I think Mr. Agnew is right, and Mrs. Rangeley is altogether wrong," she said. "There couldn't be a better illustration of it than in those two young art-student friends of yours. Miss Saunders is beautiful in just that absolute way Mr. Agnew speaks of; you simply can't refuse to see it; and Miss Maybough is fascinating, if you feel her so. I should think you'd find her very difficult to paint, and with Miss Saunders there, all the time, I should be afraid of getting her decided qualities into my picture."

      Ludlow said, "Ah, that's very interesting."

      He meant to outstay the rest, for he wished to speak with Wetmore alone, and it seemed as though those people would never go. They went at last. Mrs. Wetmore herself went off to the domestic quarter of the apartment, and left the two men together.

      "'Baccy?" asked Wetmore, with a hospitable gesture toward the pipes on his mantel.

      "No, thank you," said Ludlow.

      "Well?"

      "Wetmore, what was it you saw in my picture today, when you began with that 'Hello' of yours, and then broke off to say something else?"

      "Did I do that? Well, if you really wish to know——"

      "I do!"

      "I'll tell you. I was going to ask you which of those two girls you had painted it from. The topography was the topography of Miss Maybough, but the landscape was the landscape of Miss Saunders." He waited, as if for Ludlow to speak; then he went on: "I supposed you had been working from some new theory of yours, and I thought I had said about as much on your theories as you would stand for the time."

      "Was that all?" Ludlow asked.

      "All? It seems to me that's a good deal to be compressed into one small 'hello.'"

      Wetmore lighted a pipe, and began to smoke in great comfort. "We were talking, just before you dropped in, of what you may call the psychical chemistry of our kind of shop: the way a fellow transmutes himself into everything he does. I can trace the man himself in every figure he draws or models. You can't get away from yourself, simply because you are always thinking yourself, or through yourself; you can't see or know any one else in any other way."

      "It's a very curious thing," said Ludlow, uneasily. "I've noticed that, too; I suppose every one has. But—good-night."

      Wetmore followed him out of the studio to the head of the public stairs with a lamp, and Ludlow stopped there again. "Should you think there was anything any one but you would notice?"

      "You mean the two girls themselves? Well, I should say, on general principles, that what two such girls didn't see in your work——"

      "Of course! Then—what would you do? Would you speak to her about it?"

      "Which?"

      "You know: Miss Saunders."

      "Ah! It seems rather difficult, doesn't it?"

      "Confoundedly."

      "Why, if you mean to say it was unconscious, perhaps I was mistaken. The thing may have been altogether in my own mind. I'd like to take another look at it——"

      "You can't. I've painted it out." Ludlow ran down one flight of the stairs, and then came stumbling quickly back. "I say, Wetmore. Do you tell your wife everything?"

      "My dear boy, I don't tell her anything. She finds it out. But, then, she never tells anybody."