WHEN he had disappeared down the street, Margaret sat staring at the ground, her color still high, her eyes holding a delicate, spiritual effulgence, her breast rising and falling under stress of fiercely contending impulses, my Christian duty to forgive,” she argued. “I know he has repented, and he couldn’t have been wholly to blame. His grosser nature was tempted. He fell, but he loved me in a different way. He loves me still, or he wouldn’t want me now. He showed it in New York. He has suffered enough, and I ought to take him back. But can I? Can I? How could I forget, with her and his child right under my eyes? Perhaps, if I went to see her, that might help me decide. I ought to have gone, anyway. She really has had a hard life.”
With her hand on her breast, as though the thought had given her actual physical pain, she bowed for a few minutes; then she calmly rose, fastened the strings of her graceful hat under her pretty chin, and walked deliberately down to Mrs. Barry’s. Lionel was playing with some colored building-blocks on the porch, and looked up in vast surprise.
“Where is your mother?” Margaret asked, timidly. “May I see her?”
“She is in the studio,” the child said. “She is making a picture.”
At this moment Dora stepped out into the hall from a room on the right, and with a look of undisguised and almost perturbed surprise she came forward.
“Oh, she is beautiful—beautiful!” ran like a dart through the visitor’s brain. “She is a thousand times more now than she used to be; she has grown, developed. Such hair, such eyes, such color, such a perfect figure!”
“I think I heard you asking for me,” Dora said, calmly, something—perhaps it was the sheer immunity of genius and conscious purity of purpose—lifting her above the embarrassment of the situation.
“Yes, I came to see you,” Margaret said, bewildered by Dora’s appearance and the growing sense of her wonderful and forceful personality. “I ought to have come before, I am well aware; but I hope you won’t turn me away.”
“Why should I, Margaret?” Even in the unruffled voice of the recluse there was a mellow hint of oblivion to the social degradation the outside world had draped her with. “Would you mind coming into my workroom? It is about as cheerful as our stuffy little parlor.”
“Oh, you stilt paint?” Margaret cried, as she stood in the doorway and saw the pictures leaning here and there and tacked to the wooden partition.
“Yes, I had to have some occupation,” Dora responded, quite frankly, “and I took it up. I think I should have died but for my art.”
“And did you really do all these?” Margaret stared in admiration. “Oh, they are lovely, lovely!”
“I’m glad you like them,” Dora said, appreciatively. “I am sorry I happen to have only these. Just last week I sent a box of the best away. I may as well tell you that I sell them—or, rather, have them sold for me.”
“Oh, you do, really? How nice!—how very nice!” Margaret sat down almost in utter bewilderment. The whole thing was like a dream—the wonderful intellectual poise of the girl-like artist; her beauty; her charm; the far-away look of almost conscious superiority in the long-lashed, indescribable eyes. “And you intend to go on with your art?”
“Oh yes, to the end—to the very end of life, and beyond, too, perhaps,” answered Dora, with a merry, philosophical laugh. “I am working toward a glorious goal. Far-off Paris beckons me, Margaret, even in my sleep. Mother and I read of nothing else now, and think of nothing else. We study French in our poor way, and speak it together. Even Lionel lisps a word of it now and then. Yes, Paris and my boy mean all to me now. This has been a prison for our little family, but there the breath of art animates all life. The people are not narrow; they rank essential purity above the sordid hypocrisy of mere convention. There my boy might grow up unconscious of—but you know what I mean.”
“Yes, yes,” Margaret said, a vast womanly sympathy springing up within her that fairly swept her from the condemnatory position she had so long held.
“And we hope to manage it very soon now,”............