The black-brown eyes burned soulfully.
The panneling back of her was of dark oak, burnished by the rays of an afternoon winter sun.
Stephanie Platow had dressed for this opportunity.
Her full, rich, short black hair was caught by a childish band of blood-red ribbon, holding it low over her temples and ears.
Her lithe body, so harmonious in its graven roundness, was clad in an apple-green bodice, and a black skirt with gussets of red about the hem; her smooth arms, from the elbows down, were bare. On one wrist was the jade bracelet he had given her.
Her stockings were apple-green silk, and, despite the chill of the day, her feet were shod in enticingly low slippers with brass buckles.
Cowperwood retired to the hall to hang up his overcoat and came back smiling.
“Isn’t Mrs. Cowperwood about?”
“The butler says she’s out calling, but I thought I’d wait a little while, anyhow. She may come back.”
She turned up a dark, smiling face to him, with languishing, inscrutable eyes, and he recognized the artist at last, full and clear.
“I see you like my bracelet, don’t you?”
“It’s beautiful,” she replied, looking down and surveying it dreamily.
“I don’t always wear it. I carry it in my muff.
I’ve just put it on for a little while.
I carry them all with me always.
I love them so.
I like to feel them.”
She opened a small chamois bag beside her—lying with her handkerchief and a sketch-book which she always carried—and took out the ear-rings and brooch.
Cowperwood glowed with a strange feeling of approval and enthusiasm at this manifestation of real interest.
He liked jade himself very much, but more than that the feeling that prompted this expression in another.
Roughly speaking, it might have been said of him that youth and hope in women—particularly youth when combined with beauty and ambition in a girl—touched him.
He responded keenly to her impulse to do or be something in this world, whatever it might be, and he looked on the smart, egoistic vanity of so many with a kindly, tolerant, almost parental eye.
Poor little organisms growing on the tree of life—they would burn out and fade soon enough. He did not know the ballad of the roses of yesteryear, but if he had it would have appealed to him.
He did not care to rifle them, willy-nilly; but should their temperaments or tastes incline them in his direction, they would not suffer vastly in their lives because of him.
The fact was, the man was essentially generous where women were concerned.
“How nice of you!” he commented, smiling.
“I like that.”
And then, seeing a note-book and pencil beside her, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“Just sketching.”
“Let me see?”
“It’s nothing much,” she replied, deprecatingly.
“I don’t draw very well.”
“Gifted girl!” he replied, picking it up.
“Paints, draws, carves on wood, plays, sings, acts.”
“All rather badly,” she sighed, turning her head languidly and looking away.
In her sketch-book she had put all of her best drawings; there were sketches of nude women, dancers, torsos, bits of running figures, sad, heavy, sensuous heads and necks of sleeping girls, chins up, eyelids down, studies of her brothers and sister, and of her father and mother.
“Delightful!” exclaimed Cowperwood, keenly alive to a new treasure.
Good heavens, where had been his eyes all this while?
Here was a jewel lying at his doorstep—innocent, untarnished—a real jewel.
These drawings suggested a fire of perception, smoldering and somber, which thrilled him.
“These are beautiful to me, Stephanie,” he said, simply, a strange, uncertain feeling of real affection creeping over him.
The man’s greatest love was for art.
It was hypnotic to him.
“Did you ever study art?” he asked.
“No.”
“And you never studied acting?”
“No.”
She shook her head in a slow, sad, enticing way.
The black hair concealing her ears moved him strangely.
“I know the art of your stage work is real, and you have a natural art which I just seem to see.