Part 9 (2/2)

”I can't write in a mess,” interrupted Miss Oliver, a shade ruefully. ”I haven't written a line since I came to New York.” Then she sighed. ”I only wish I hadn't written a word before coming. At home I thought I was a genius; now I know I am a fool.”

”I have felt the same way,” said Mariana, sympathetically, ”but it doesn't last. The first stage-manager I went to I almost fell at his feet; the next almost fell at mine. Neither of them gave me a place, but they taught me the value of men.”

”I don't think it's worth learning,” returned Miss Oliver, pa.s.sing her caramels. ”Try one, and see if they are hard.”

”Poor Gerty!” drawled Miss Hill, watching Mariana bite the caramel. ”She faces editors and all kinds of bad characters. Her views of life are depressing.”

”They are not views,” remonstrated Miss Oliver, ”they are facts. Facts are always depressing, except when they are maddening.”

”I have begged her to leave off writing and take to water-color or china painting,” said Miss Freighley, cheerfully, ”but she won't.”

”How can she?” asked Mariana.

”Of course I can't,” retorted Miss Oliver, shortly. ”I never had a paint-brush in my hand in my life, except when I was cleaning it.”

Miss Freighley laid her sewing aside and stretched her arms.

”It only requires a little determination,” she said, ”and I have it. I got tired of Alabama. I couldn't come to New York without an object, so I invented one. It was as good as any other, and I stuck to it.”

Miss Hill shook her head, and her glorious hair shone like amber.

”Art is serious,” she said, slowly. She was just entering the life-cla.s.s at the Art League.

”But the artist is not,” returned Miss Freighley, ”and one can be an artist without having any art. I am. They think at home I am learning to paint pictures to go on the parlor wall in place of the portraits that were burned in the war. But I am not. I am here because I love New York, and--”

”Claude Nevins,” concluded Miss Oliver.

Mariana looked up with interest. ”How nice!” she said. ”He told me you were awfully pretty.”

Miss Freighley blushed and laughed.

”Nonsense!” she rejoined; ”but Gerty is so faithful to her young fellow down South that it has gone to her brain.”

”I am faithful because I have no opportunity for faithlessness,” sang Gerty to an accompaniment she was picking upon the guitar. ”I have been in love one--two--six times since I came to New York. Once it was with an editor, who accepted my first story. He was short and thick and gray-haired, but I loved him. Once it was with that dark, ill-fed man who rooms next to Mariana. He almost knocked me down upon the stairway and forgot to apologize. I have forgotten the honorable others, as the j.a.panese say, but I know it is six times, because whenever it happened I made a little cross-mark on my desk, and there are six of them.”

”It must have been Mr. Ardly,” said Mariana. ”I never look at him without thinking what an adorable lover he would make.”

”He has such nice hands,” said Miss Oliver. ”I do like a man with nice hands.”

”And he is clean-shaven,” added Miss Freighley. ”I detest a man with a beard.”

Miss Hill crossed her thin ankles upon the hearth.

”Love should be taken seriously,” she said, with a wistful look in her dark eyes.

Miss Freighley's pretty, inconsequent laugh broke in.

”That is one of Juliet's plat.i.tudes,” she said. ”But, my dear, it shouldn't be taken seriously. Indeed, it shouldn't be taken at all--except in cases of extreme _ennui_, and then in broken doses. The women who take men seriously--and taking love means taking men, of course--sit down at home and grow shapeless and have babies galore. To grow shapeless is the fate of the woman who takes sentiment seriously.

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