On this first day of the show, Hellgren himself might be present, and if so, one thing might lead to another—or be made to lead. In any case the exhibition rooms would serve as a reconnoitring ground.
The show was under the auspices of a dealer in the rue la Boétie, and when Grover arrived there, late in the afternoon, he found only a few visitors. Fashionable patrons of the arts, he supposed, had attended the private showing.
Inan inner room, before the model of the monument, Hellgren himself stood, his bulk almost blotting from Grover's view the miniature forms of the "horses and tanks and everything," as Floss had described the Swede's heroic composition. With flourishes of his fat arms he was elucidating its allegories to a tall, slinking woman who, if Grover could believe his eyes, was Mignon Mangini of Idaho Falls.
It was disconcerting to find Mamie here, doubtless following up her advantage with the one man who had ever been seen to respond for more than five minutes at a stretch to her dogged undulations. In the same mystic tone in which she had once, her eyes half closed, told Grover that she was a fervent devotee of the Upanishads, of which he didn't believe her capable of quoting a single precept, she was now, as he approached the pair, murmuring her response to the ecstatic gesture of the wounded poilu at the head of the forlorn parade. "I know just what you meant," she said. "The victory of the Idea, the triumph of faith."
