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By any person in the ordinary walks of life it would have been called a tea, but Pelgram preferred to denominate it a private view. Every time he completed a work that he considered of real importance relatively more often than modesty might have prescribed he celebrated the birth of the masterpiece by one of these oddly termed baptisms in tannin.
Miss Hurd, whose feelings had not been in the least lacerated by the reference to her parent's notable eccentricity of retentiveness, but who had been amused at the suggestion, interposed. "I'm afraid it couldn't be done," she said. "Louis von Glauber passes on every picture that father buys." "That settles that, then," Pelgram rejoined. "Well, Benny, anything to suggest?" Wilkinson inquired.
His adversary continued his placid progress down the room until he reached the tea table, where immediately he could be heard inquiring whether the diminutive "arrangements in green and white" were intended for lettuce sandwiches. Pelgram glanced quickly toward where Miss Maitland still sat, surrounded by her attentive friends.
The whole thing would have been a magnificent and unusual symbol of the triumph of paint over paper a new and vivid illustration of the practical value of true art." "Oh, nonsense, Charlie!" said Pelgram, much annoyed at being made the rather vulnerable subject of Wilkinson's humor. His tormentor was delighted at perceiving his victim writhe and went gayly on.
Presently Bennington Cole announced that he must be going on, as he had an appointment with an out-of-town insurance agent who was leaving Boston that evening, and soon afterward Miss Maitland took her departure, escorted by Pelgram. Then Wilkinson went, having executed as much havoc as he could among the comestibles, and Isabel was left with her father. Mr.
Pelgram became gradually less certain in his attendance, and finally his struggle with the refractory liver ended in the victory of that inconspicuous but important organ, and he passed peacefully away at a German spa in the course of taking a cure which would very likely have killed him even had he been in perfectly normal health.
But with people, his first likes and dislikes were definite and usually final, and this quality of personal consistency had come to a fixed focus on Helen Maitland. Helen, for her part, had never given him any other encouragement than to express her approval of some of his pictures that she honestly liked, but Pelgram needed no other encouragement.
As they came to Portland Street, waiting at the crossing for a motor-car to pass, Pelgram quite suddenly said, "I wish I could paint you here and just as you are looking now." The girl flushed a little. The compliment was conventional enough, but there was a tone in his voice that she had never heard before and that carried its meaning clearly. "Thank you.
"Well, complete it. You are tired of Pelgram, I suppose," said Isabel, composedly. "Pelgram, then. Yes, I am," the other girl admitted. Her friend raised her eyebrows, and glanced at her somewhat curiously. "You don't have to marry him, you know," she remarked in a matter-of-fact tone. "Of course I don't," Helen replied quickly.
Promptly at nine o'clock in the morning of every business day for fifteen years, Hannibal G. Pelgram, uncle of Stanwood Pelgram, had seated himself at his desk in the office of the Pelgram Plumbers' Supply Company, and it was rarely that he left before his stenographer had begun to show signs of impatience and anxiety.
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