"That is not enthusiastic."

"You mustn't ask me; I'm not an art critic."

"What a pity."

"A pity that I'm not an art critic?"

"No. A pity for a beautiful girl to do anything but exist."

Wilmot's eyebrows went up a little. The beggar's speech surprised him, and pleased him, since it expressed a favorite thought of his own.

"Is any of her work on exhibition? Having seen her once, one takes an interest, you know."

"I think there is nothing that can be seen," said Wilmot coolly, "except upon special invitation. And I think she is very shy of showing anything that she has done."

"True artists," said Blizzard, who criminally was an artist himself and knew what he was talking about, "live in the future."

Again Wilmot's eyebrows went up a little. Why should a legless beggar be able to make loans of fifteen thousand dollars, and why should he be able to talk like a gentleman?

"I am interested in art," continued Blizzard; "sometimes I have earned a few dollars by sitting for my portrait."

He did not add that he continually put himself in the way of artists in the hope that his fame as a model would reach Barbara, and touch her imagination. He did not add that he haunted Washington Square and McBurney Place, where her studio was, in the hope that his face, which he knew to be different and more terrible than other faces, might kindle a fire of inspiration in her. He believed rightly that if a woman once looked him in the eyes she would never forget him. But hitherto Barbara had not so much as glanced at him, since she carried her lovely head very high, and looked straight before her as she went. While, as for him, he stood upon the stumps of his legs, a gigantic sort of dwarf, beneath the notice of the proud-eyed and the tall.

Wilmot passed out of the place in deep thought; not even the pretty girls plaiting straw won a glance from him. Coupled with the relief of being out of present difficulties was a disagreeable sense of foreboding. 

 Prev. P 11/216 next