The Amouretta landscape, and other storiesAdams, Adeline
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The Amouretta landscape, and other stories
Adams, Adeline
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
That summer, Maurice painted many other landscapes. There were falls,
brooks, and rocks in that glamorous country, and these he showed in
their beauty as he saw it. There was also an enchanted road under
enchanted pines, where he once beheld Paolo and Francesca walking at
twilight; this too became matter of record, to be taken up later and
played with for heart’s delight. Rumors of his latest work reached the
art galleries. New Yorkers know those galleries, dotting the Avenue from
the Library to the Plaza, and even blossoming out into side streets of
lower rental. And the merry war between artist and dealer, as eternal and
various (and perhaps as little reasonable) as the war between the sexes,
would be taken up with renewed vigor in the autumn. Price had received
letters from the Abingdon, the Buckminster, the Clarendon; from As You
Like It, even, as well as from Farintosh and from MacDuff. The letters
were similar in content; their writers had heard of his landscapes—a
new line for him, was it not? The buying public would be interested, of
course, and would he care to exhibit in their well-appointed galleries?
They would be glad to hear from him at his early convenience. Price
smiled, and answered, declining.
In fact, he was interested, not financially but sympathetically, in a
gallery from which he had received no letters;—an out-of-the-way little
gallery, a modest ground-floor-and-mezzanine affair slowly becoming
better known and liked as the Court of New Departures. He was interested
because this fantastically named refuge for originality in art was a
business venture (a venture that must be _made_ to succeed!) undertaken
by Hal Wrayne, a madcap young cousin. Hal Wrayne’s father had always kept
this only son of his well-supplied with means for cutting up harmless
capers, at school and in college; and Hal himself, both by nature and by
training the perfect comedian in life, had hardly stopped to ask where he
was going, all so joyous, until, on his father’s sudden death, he found
himself almost penniless, with a wife and baby daughter to support, and
with a mother and sister who needed his help.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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