As we walked to the museum I caught glimpses of what Donald's past
life had been, learning incidentally that his father was rich, but
since Donald was sixteen he had been considered a ne'er-do-well. He
had gone away to sea when he was a boy, and had been third mate on a
merchant ship; in a hotel in America he had been a boot-black, and
just before he came to Paris he fought a drunken stoker and won a
purse of five pounds.
She asked me which were the best pictures, but she could not keep her
attention fixed, and her attempts to remember the names of the
painters were pathetic. "Ingres, did you say? I must try to
remember.... Puvis de Chavannes? What a curious name! but I do like
his picture. He has given that man Donald's shoulders," she said,
laying her hand on my arm and stopping me before a picture of a young
naked man sitting amid some grey rocks, with grey trees and a grey
sky. The young man in the picture had dark curly hair, and Mildred
said she would like to sit by him and put her hands through his hair.
"He has got big muscles, just like Donald. I like a man to be strong:
I hate a little man."
We wandered on talking of love and lovers, our conversation
occasionally interrupted, for however interested I was in Mildred, and
I was very much interested, the sight of a picture sometimes called
away my attention. When we came to the sculpture-room it seemed to me
that Mildred was more interested in sculpture than in painting, for
she stopped suddenly before Rodin's "L'age d'arain," and I began to
wonder if her mind were really accessible to the beauty of the
sculptor's art, or if her interest were entirely in the model that had
posed before Rodin. Sculpture is a more primitive art than painting;
sculpture and music are the two primitive arts, and they are therefore
open to the appreciation of the vulgar; at least, that is how I tried
to correlate Mildred with Rodin, and at the same moment the thought
rose up in my mind that one so interested in sex as Mildred was could
not be without interest in art. For though it be true that sex is
antecedent to art, art was enlisted in the service of sex very early
in the history of the race, and has, if a colloquialism may be allowed
here, done yeoman service ever since. Even in modern days,
notwithstanding the invention of the telephone and the motor car, we
are still dependent upon art for the beginning of our courtships.
To-day the courtship begins by the man and the woman sending each
other books. Before books were invented music served the purpose of
the lover. For when man ceased to capture woman, he went to the
river's edge and cut a reed and made it into a flute and played it for
her pleasure; and when he had won her with his music he began to take
an interest in the tune for its own sake. Amusing thoughts like these
floated through my mind in the Luxembourg galleries--how could it be
otherwise since I was there with Mildred?--and I began to argue that
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