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Updated: May 16, 2025
He rolled over on the grass and began to make a dandelion curl. "No, that's not it. You're a good deal likelier than you used to be. You're all possibilities now. I could make a Madonna out of you, quick as a wink. No, it's because I've decided to paint Marshby instead." Mary's hands stilled themselves, and she looked at him anxiously. "Why are you doing that?" she asked.
She stood wilfully swaying a branch of the tendrilled arbor, and, he subtly felt, so dissatisfied with herself for her temporary disloyalty that she felt alien to them both: Marshby because she had wronged him by admitting another man to this intimate knowledge of him, and the other man for being her accomplice. "Don't be sorry," he said, softly. "You haven't been naughty."
"It's a foregone conclusion that the consulship will be offered him," said Mary. Her eyes were now on the path leading through the garden and over the wall to the neighboring house where Marshby lived. "Then you will marry and go with him. Ah, well, that's finished. I needn't come another summer. When you are in Paris, I can show you the boulevards and cafés."
A strange illuminative process went on in his mind toward the man as Mary saw him, and more and more he nursed a fretful sympathy with her desire to see Marshby tuned up to some pitch that should make him livable to himself. It seemed a cruelty of nature that any man should so scorn his own company and yet be forced to keep it through an allotted span.
Jerome got the look in her face, and smiled a little, sadly. "Yes," he said, "you're sure." Mary immediately felt unable to encounter them together. She gave Marshby a good-morning, and, to his bewilderment, made some excuse about her weeding and flitted past him on the path. His eyes followed her, and when they came back to Wilmer the artist nodded brightly. "I've just asked her," he said.
Jerome knew his face, knew it from their college days together and through these annual visits of his own; but now, as Marshby approached, the artist rated him not so much by the friendly as the professional eye. He saw a man who looked the scholar and the gentleman, keen though not imperious of glance.
The question had only a civil emphasis, but a warmer tone informed it. Mary grew pink under the morning light, and Jerome went on: "Yes, I have a perfect right to talk about it, I don't travel three thousand miles every summer to ask you to marry me without earning some claim to frankness. I mentioned that to Marshby himself. We met at the station, you remember, the day I came.
"Asked her?" Marshby was about to pass him, pulling out his glasses and at the same time peering at the picture with the impatience of his near-sighted look. "There, don't you do that!" cried Jerome, stopping, with his brush in air. "Don't you come round and stare over my shoulder. It makes me nervous ad the devil. Step back there there by that mullein. So! I've got to face my protagonist.
It had its lines the lines that are the scars of battle; but somehow not one suggested, even to the doubtful mind, a battle lost. Jerome turned from the picture to the man himself, and had his own surprise. Marshby was transfigured. He breathed humility and hope. He stirred at Wilmer's motion. "Am I" he glowed "could I have looked like that?"
"You'd have an awfully good time in Paris." She was perfectly still, watching him, and he went on: "Now you're thinking if Marshby gets the consulate you'll be across the water anyway, and you could run down to Paris and see the sights. But it wouldn't be the same thing. It's Marshby you like, but you'd have a better time with me."
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