CHAPTER II
THE ARTISTS
The pretentiousness of a studio, especially a Washington Square studio, is quite often in inverse proportion to the merit of the pictures it gives up.
But Tommy Locke’s studio defeated this description by being a golden mean as to both propositions.
Indeed, Henry Post, the artist’s cynical friend, said that Locke’s draperies and his canvases showed a wonderfully similar lack of distinction.
And Kate Vallon had quickly added, “Let’s call them his appointments and disappointments.”
But Tommy Locke had only smiled comfortably and had gone on painting his interminable green and blue landscapes in which, if anybody cared for a certain vague misty charm—they did not find it entirely lacking.
And even if he had no high-backed, gilt-framed Italian arm-chairs and no armor or ragged priests’ robes, he often had good-looking bowls of even better looking flowers and he served first-rate tea, and somehow the neighbors loved to drift in and out of his nondescript rooms.
His ways were ways of pleasantness and all his paths were peace, yet though his chums were usually tolerant and broad-minded thinkers, there was little real Bohemianism in evidence, that is, the Bohemianism of what is known as The Village.
His few worthwhile bits of old furniture stood upon worthwhile old rugs and his specimens of artistic junk were few and far between.
