The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Special Type/Chapter 1
I
She was, of course, often in and out, Mrs. Cavenham, three years ago, when I was painting her portrait; and the more so that I found her, I remember, one of those comparatively rare sitters who present themselves at odd hours, turn up without an appointment. The thing is to get most women to keep those they do make; but she used to pop in, as she called it, on the chance, letting me know that if I had a moment free she was quite at my service. When I hadn't the moment free she liked to stay to chatter, and she more than once expressed to me, I recollect, her theory that an artist really, for the time, could never see too much of his model. I must have shown her rather frankly that I understood her as meaning that a model could never see too much of her artist. I understood in fact everything, and especially that she was, in Brivet's absence, so unoccupied and restless that she didn't know what to do with herself. I was conscious in short that it was he who would pay for the picture, and that gives, I think, the measure of my enlightenment. If I took such pains and bore so with her folly, it was fundamentally for Brivet.
I was often at that time, as I had often been before, occupied—for various "subjects"—with Mrs. Dundene, in connection with which a certain occasion comes back to me as the first slide in the lantern. If I had invented my story I couldn't have made it begin better than with Mrs. Cavenham's irruption during the presence one morning of that lady. My door, by some chance, had been unguarded, and she was upon us without a warning. This was the sort of thing my model hated—the one, I mean, who, after all, sat mainly to oblige; but I remember how well she behaved. She was not dressed for company, though indeed a dress was never strictly necessary to her best effect. I recall that I had a moment of uncertainty, but I must have dropped the name of each for the other, as it was Mrs. Cavenham's line always, later on, that I had made them acquainted; and inevitably, though I wished her not to stay and got rid of her as soon as possible, the two women, of such different places in the scale, but of such almost equal beauty, were face to face for some minutes, of which I was not even at the moment unaware that they made an extraordinary use for mutual inspection. It was sufficient; they from that instant knew each other.
"Isn't she lovely?" I remember asking—and quite without the spirit of mischief—when I came back from restoring my visitor to her cab.
"Yes, awfully pretty. But I hate her."
"Oh," I laughed, "she's not so bad as that."
"Not so handsome as I, you mean?" And my sitter protested. "It isn't fair of you to speak as if I were one of those who can't bear even at the worst—or the best—another woman's looks. I should hate her even if she were ugly."
"But what have you to do with her?"
She hesitated; then with characteristic looseness: "What have I to do with anyone?"
"Well, there's no one else I know of that you do hate."
"That shows," she replied, "how good a reason there must be, even if I don't know it yet."
She knew it in the course of time, but I have never seen a reason, I must say, operate so little for relief. As a history of the hatred of Alice Dundene my anecdote becomes wondrous indeed. Meanwhile, at any rate, I had Mrs. Cavenham again with me for her regular sitting, and quite as curious as I had expected her to be about the person of the previous time.
"Do you mean she isn't, so to speak, a lady?" she asked after I had, for reasons of my own, fenced a little. "Then if she's not 'professional' either, what is she?"
"Well," I returned as I got at work, "she escapes, to my mind, any classification save as one of the most beautiful and good-natured of women."
"I see her beauty," Mrs. Cavenham said. "It's immense. Do you mean that her good-nature's as great?"
I had to think a little. "On the whole, yes."
"Then I understand. That represents a greater quantity than I, I think, should ever have occasion for."
"Oh, the great thing's to be sure to have enough," I growled.
But she laughed it off. "Enough, certainly, is as good as a feast!"
It was—I forget how long, some months—after this that Frank Brivet, whom I had not seen for two years, knocked again at my door. I didn't at all object to him at my other work as I did to Mrs. Cavenham, but it was not till he had been in and out several times that Alice—which is what most people still really call her—chanced to see him and received in such an extraordinary way the impression that was to be of such advantage to him. She had been obliged to leave me that day before he went—though he stayed but a few minutes later; and it was not till the next time we were alone together that I was struck with her sudden interest, which became frankly pressing. I had met her, to begin with, expansively enough.
"An American? But what sort—don't you know? There are so many."
I didn't mean it as an offence, but in the matter of men, and though her acquaintance with them is so large, I always simplify with her. "The sort. He's rich."
"And how rich?"
"Why, as an American. Disgustingly."
I told her on this occasion more about him, but it was on that fact, I remember, that, after a short silence, she brought out with a sigh: "Well, I'm sorry. I should have liked to love him for himself."