Artists -- Relations with women -- Fiction; Artists -- United States -- Fiction
At that time she had insisted on a complete and radical change for
herself. She had managed to get, through one art dealer and another,
orders for some of her spirited clay figurines. There was a dancing
girl, a visualization of one of the moods of Carmencita, a celebrated
dancer of the period, which had caught the public fancy--at least the
particular art dealer who was handling her work for her had managed to
sell some eighteen replicas of it at $175 each. Miss Finch's share of
this was $100, each. There was another little thing, a six-inch bronze
called "Sleep," which had sold some twenty replicas at $150 each, and
was still selling. "The Wind," a figure crouching and huddling as if
from cold, was also selling. It looked as though she might be able to
make from three to four thousand dollars a year steadily.
She demanded of her mother at this time the right to a private studio,
to go and come when she pleased, to go about alone wherever she wished,
to have men and women come to her private apartment, and be entertained
by her in her own manner. She objected to supervision in any form, cast
aside criticism and declared roundly that she would lead her own life.
She realized sadly while she was doing it, however, that the best was
gone--that she had not had the wit or the stamina to do as she pleased
at the time she most wanted to do so. Now she would be almost
automatically conservative. She could not help it.
Eugene when he first met her felt something of this. He felt the
subtlety of her temperament, her philosophic conclusions, what might be
called her emotional disappointment. She was eager for life, which
seemed to him odd, for she appeared to have so much. By degrees he got
it out of her, for they came to be quite friendly and then he understood
clearly just how things were.
By the end of three months and before Christina Channing appeared,
Eugene had come to the sanest, cleanest understanding with Miss Finch
that he had yet reached with any woman. He had dropped into the habit of
calling there once and sometimes twice a week. He had learned to
understand her point of view, which was detachedly aesthetic and rather
removed from the world of the sensuous. Her ideal of a lover had been
fixed to a certain extent by statues and poems of Greek youth--Hylas,
Adonis, Perseus, and by those men of the Middle Ages painted by Millais,
Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. She had hoped
for a youth with a classic outline of face, distinction of form,
graciousness of demeanor and an appreciative intellect. He must be manly
but artistic. It was a rather high ideal, not readily capable of
attainment by a woman already turned thirty, but nevertheless worth
dreaming about.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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