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"Hello!" he said, the timbre of real youth in his voice, which childhood is so quick to detect from the silly enameling of tone coated on by grown-ups for the occasion. "I want to paint you, youngster." "Oh, Lilly, what fun!" "Then she is your sister?" "Oh no, Mrs. Daab; she is my daughter." "But the name " "It's our way together." "How droll!" "Do you think I'm pretty?"
He stepped forward then, lanky and rugged, with a great shock of upstanding gray hair, with the path of his fingers through it and his features with no scheme at all. Just very delightfully irregular, he jutted out of any crowd. "Zoe, Mr. and Mrs. Daab want to meet you." She lifted her clean gaze, dropped a courtesy, and held out her hand with the short, curved gesture of childhood.
She might have been stunned, trying to keep her equilibrium by a series of rapid little blinks, Lilly meanwhile sunk into a heap and crying down into her hands. "Lilly dearest darling est " "Don't talk to me." "But, Lilly you you've always wanted me to be true to myself." "You're not true to yourself. You're true to a pose, a silly fad that you've picked up around the Daab studio."
I think that is what Mr. Daab means by 'radiant innocence, Zoe. Fearless knowledge of truth." He whistled softly in the gloom. "Extraordinary!" said Mrs. Daab. "And you are one of us aren't you, dear?" "For suffrage? Oh yes; and I am going to be a real one when I grow up." "What else are you going to be?" "A singer." "You said that as if you meant it." "I do. I've already heard nine operas.
An upright piano was stacked with music, and, in spite of Lilly's argument for them, no pictures on the walls, only a brilliant panel portrait of Zoe, signed Gedney Daab, her young form in faint profile against a background of cloth of gold, the face up-flung to a flow of sunlight that crossed the picture in a churchy ray. "If we cannot have originals or etchings, we won't have any.
Daab turned her head. "Gedney," she said, "couldn't you give her a note to Trieste?" "Good!" he said, feeling for a card and scrawling across its face. "This will pass you directly to his nibs." "You couldn't have granted us a bigger favor," said Lilly, feeling her face glow. "Then you grant me one. Bring your little girl to my Fifty-ninth Street studio. I want to paint her." "Indeed I will!"
Gedney Daab looked down at her ardent artlessness without a burst of laughter. "Oh, as little girls go." "Zoe knows God has merely given her a fair urn of a body, Mr. Daab, which she, in turn, must fill with beauty of mind and spirit." "You are the Dolorosa, aren't you?" continued Zoe, turning to Mrs. Daab. "The sad one with the tears that don't show, from crying on the inside of you."
Visits to the Daab studio, faithful in effect to a Doge's palace and where she was more and more a favorite, and also to the pretentious homes of one or two school companions, had an upsetting effect upon her. The long, gloomy neck of hallway depressed her and she voiced bitterly a secret aversion of Lilly's for the single bathroom with the ugly wooden floor and shallow bathtub.
"And we live at Park Hill; so you see we hardly regard that as far." They were presently riding through the Park, Zoe facing the three of them in the soft gray interior of the Daab limousine. She was absolutely artless. "I've been in a taxi three times and a hansom once. But I prefer this. I shall have my own some day only, purple upholstery instead of gray sort of wine color "
"You come to my studio, little lady, and I am going to paint you just as golden and radiantly innocent as you are." "What is 'radiantly innocent'?" "Good Lord! I don't know any definition of it except you." "Zoe has no innocence in one sense, Mr. Daab. Her real innocence lies in the fact that life has no ugly secrets from her. She knows the beautiful from the ugly, and why it is so.
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