“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! “However, there can’t be a man concealed in your mind, you are too transparent,—I should have known it, and helped matters nicely to a focus for you. Yet the copy-books used to say ‘still waters run deep’; who knows, innocent-looking mountain Brooke, but there is a great, deep, still swimming pool somewhere in your mind!” “Bless me, she is teasable after all!” ejaculated Lucy, for, while she was still gabbling, Brooke had left her, slipped through the portières, held apart by two footmen, given her name to a third, shaken her hostess cordially by the hand, and after carefully giving her mother’s message of regret, melted away in the crowd. “Charming girl, that Miss Lawton,” was Mrs. Parks’s mental comment. “I guess, after all, there is something in having a well-bred-to-the-bone mother. Three hundred people have squeezed my fingers already this afternoon and murmured all sorts of things, while they either gazed over my head or at my gown. She is the first one that looked at _me_ and as if she meant what she said, or would really do me a good turn if she could.” And the Senator’s ambitious wife gazed after Brooke rather wistfully. CHAPTER V A PICTURE