Chapter FOUR: I

She needn’t have worried; neither Enid nor Dodo Mell asked a single question. Somewhere near ten o’clock Enid woke up and at once shook her sleepy friend, who, after putting on her spectacles and a lavender kimono, set to work to make coffee. And suddenly discovered Rosaleen asleep in a chair in the studio.

“Coffee, Rosaleen!” she called, cheerfully.

She awoke with a start and sat up, pale and dishevelled, in her party dress and slippers. But they showed no surprise. Breakfast was ready on a trunk in the back room and they all sat down to it, the benign Dodo in her kimono, Enid in a smock and petticoat, with her bare feet in mules, and Rosaleen with her incongruously dissipated look.

“_Nice_ rolls!” said Enid. “Where’d you get them, Rosaleen?”

“A little new baker’s,” Rosaleen answered.

Never had her friends seemed so charming, or a feminine world so desirable. The coffee cheered her sad heart, and raised her spirits, and after she had bathed and dressed, she lost all sense of fatigue. She had, in fact, that false vigour one sometimes has after a sleepless night, that sensation of being all mind and spirit and no body.

“Ambrose is coming this afternoon!” called Miss Mell, suddenly, from her drawing, to Rosaleen washing handkerchiefs in the rusty sink.

“Who’s Ambrose?” she asked.

“Oh, my dear, how cruel! Why, he’s the one who adored you so last night. He’s my cousin.”

Rosaleen recollected the young man like a sprightly devil, with the curly hair and the outstanding ears.

“I’d better tidy up the place then,” she said. “It’s awful.”

“I’ll treat us all to cakes for tea,” said Dodo. “If you’ll get them, Rosaleen?”

“And there are two dead mice in the trap,” said Enid. “Better take them out!”

Rosaleen protested; this was an intolerable task. But Dodo and Enid assured her that the mice would stay there until she removed them.

“And every day it’ll be worse,” said Enid.

So Rosaleen was obliged to drop the little victims into an empty cracker box and throw them out of the window at the back of the hall. She fetched the cakes and borrowed an extra cup from Miss Gosorkus. Then she sat down listlessly. Her work was all in Lawrence’s studio, and she had nothing to do.

II

Ambrose Matthews was, in fact, a very welcome distraction. He came that afternoon, and he was so nicely entertained that he returned again and again, nearly every day. Enid said she didn’t mind as long as he waited until five o’clock, because then the light wasn’t any good. Miss Mell was not disturbed by talking, or by walking, or by singing or by dancing while she worked, and Rosaleen, it must be confessed, cared very little whether she worked at all, or not.

Ambrose was a young man with an obsession. Two generations ago it would have been called Love; one generation past would have called it Women; but he, of course, called it Sex. He was a writer, he said. His father supported him, so that he didn’t need to be “commercial.” He was indeed so uncommercial that his creations never got beyond his own brain. However, he was only twenty-two, and still regarding his world.

The talk, during his visits, was supposed to be stimulating, and it resolved itself into a sort of duel between Ambrose and Rosaleen, in which Enid was the young man’s perverse second and Miss Mell assisted Rosaleen in her defense.

He used to bring lurid little magazines of strange shapes and colours, things that never lasted more than a few months.

“Why do they publish the things?” asked Miss Mell. “They certainly can’t pay. And nobody could possibly enjoy them.”

“Listen to this!” said Ambrose. “It’s _good_!”

And then would follow the expression of some individual’s point of view, which was called an “article,” always about fallen women, race suicide, and so on. It appeared from these little publications that it was not only necessary but “sincere” and altogether praiseworthy to repeat all the well-known facts and statistics on these subjects over and over, endlessly. No matter how trite, or how biased, so long as the author was “sincere” and stuck to more or less forbidden topics, his “article” _must_ be published, and his opinion _must_ be respected. It was a crime against society not to be eternally interested in these things.

Rosaleen was well aware that Ambrose had no intentions toward her of a personal nature; he was simply mildly attracted by her. But as a matter of principle he was forever urging on her his point of view. He couldn’t endure her inviolable reserve; it made him furious that she would not discuss these things. He was always saying how incomplete was the life of a woman without an “affair.” And he was not content with dissertations upon the influence of love on the soul; he became medical and pathological and sociological. According to him, the life of a spinster was not only anti-social and morbid; it was a sort of suicide; it led inevitably to madness and death. Facts did not disturb him; the numbers of self-respecting celibate women he was naturally obliged to meet, who were neither ill nor mad, and who were quite as happy as the married women, convinced him not at all. All these women, he insisted, were either absorbed in secret love-affairs, or--or they could not and did not exist. He denied them.

“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you and your professors and your doctors and your writers,” said Enid, one day. “It makes you all frantic to think that women can get along without you. Well, they can and they do, plenty of them.”

Ambrose said, no, they didn’t. Or if they did, they were dreadfully unhappy.

“No more unhappy than _with_ them,” said Enid.

As for Rosaleen, she said nothing. She didn’t agree with either Ambrose or Enid. She felt that she should have liked very much to have a husband and children, but that, if they never came to her, she should nevertheless manage to live a fairly pleasant and happy life. She knew, however, that this was not a “view,” and that no one would have been interested in hearing it.

In spite of his fixed idea, they not only tolerated Ambrose, but they were rather fond of him. He filled a gap. He was, in a way, their pet. They liked to see his curly head leaning against the back of their big wing chair; they liked to hear his voice, and to smell the smoke of his pipe. He was another young thing in their young world; and what in later life was to be highly unpleasant, was now, at twenty-three, harmless and laughable.

Lawrence never came. Dodo and Enid saw that there was a mystery here, and they spoke of it to each other more than once. Sometimes they laughed and sometimes they were angry. The way in which he had invited everyone to supper and then run off and left the others to pay! But they didn’t mention it to Rosaleen, and she, in despair of ever being able to explain that extraordinary evening, never brought up the subject. But they all missed him. Once in a while Miss Mell would say, “There goes Lawrence!” and they would run to the window, to see him, in his great fur-lined coat and silk hat, getting into a taxi, off to one of those teas where he so shone. He was inordinately fond of “society”: they read his name in the papers in connection with all sorts of pageants, charity balls, amateur theatricals, costume dances. He said he did it to get business, but that wasn’t quite true. He did it because he liked it; because he liked the idle and seductive women who flattered him. He had sitters, too, women who came in elegant limousines and had tea with him. He never raised his eyes to the windows above.

III

But one day early in April, just before the Spring came, he appeared, just as usual, in the doorway.

“Hello!” said Enid, carelessly. “We didn’t expect _you_. We haven’t any cup for your tea. We broke our only extra one this morning.”

“The obliging Dorothy Mell will go down to my room and get one,” said he, “also a package of chocolates on the table by the window. Eh?”

She did, and she brought up all Rosaleen’s work and left it secretly in the back room.

Lawrence was unusually polite. He asked them all how they were getting on, and listened with interest while they told him. They were all a little proud of their progress. Miss Mell had three big orders ahead of her. Enid was going to have an exhibition with three other young and arrogantly unpopular artists. And Rosaleen was more or less regularly employed by a magazine to do each month a page of--if you can believe that such things exist--“childrens’ fashions.”

“You’re all doing very nicely,” he said. “I’m very much pleased. I came up to give you my blessing before I go.”

“Before you go!” said Miss Mell. “Where are you going?”

“I’m giving up my place downstairs, and to-morrow, _to-morrow_, I’m off to Paris! Paris the kind, Paris the friendly! Paris the beneficent goddess of my student days! I have a nostalgia, my children.... So I shall kiss you all good-bye and give you a little fatherly advice before leaving....”

He swaggered over to Rosaleen’s table.

“No reason why you shouldn’t become successful,” he said. “You must know, my children, that brains are not necessary to an artist. An artist can be absolutely crude and ignorant, and yet be a genius. He needs only an ardent spirit. Of course, you haven’t got that, Rosaleen, but then you’re not an artist. But take this Enid girl. Give her a certain amount of knowledge, as definite as that of a brick-layer; teach this woman to draw, and she _will_ be an artist--of a sort. She doesn’t need to know anything else. She won’t need to read, or to think....”

“Oh, so you’re beginning to see me, are you?” said Enid.

“I always did see you, my dear. You’re very nice to see. Children, listen to my advice. If a woman wishes to make herself irresistible, after attending to personal appearance, I recommend her to become an artist or an actress. Nothing else will give her the same prestige--not even a lot of money. There’s a rakishness about it--a spiciness. It gives a piquancy even to Rosaleen.”

He laughed.

“Good Lord!” he said. “How they all love us! It’s queer.... Of all artists, the painter is the favourite with the public. To most of them, artist _means_ painter.... And yet, thinking it over, it’s not so hard to understand this favouritism. The painter is apt to be more ordinary, more normal, more human, than the poet or the musician. His art is more obvious, more facile. It certainly requires less ‘temperament.’ The painter is not required to be erratic and morbid. In fact, a proper painter is expected to be more or less rollicking. I ask you to consider for a moment the popular idea of what goes on in our studios! The public imagines the poet sitting up all night writing in ecstasy, the musician forever before his instrument. But the painter! Lord! They never think of us as _working_. We’re supposed to be eternally pawning our dead mother’s ring for money for Bohemian orgies, to be rowdy and care-free and generous, and all that sort of thing. The painter is the only artist that the public likes to see happy.”

“Of course it’s the easiest art to understand,” said Enid.

“Don’t talk, woman, but listen and try to learn. There’s no question here of ‘understanding’ art. But it’s easier and pleasanter for people to look at a painting, which takes only a minute, than it is to listen to an opera, or to read an epic.... So I advise you all to be artists, my children, and to enjoy yourselves.”

Then he solemnly kissed them each good-bye.

And after that, no more of Lawrence for a long time.