it expedient to ask people in to talk to me, so that my face would not become dead and sullen. There, I usually knew the people she would ask, but it occurred to me, as I was driving to her door, that in Paris I knew no one, so that, if she followed her habit, I would see new faces.
The cocher stopped his horse before an old stone house and I entered. Challenged by the concierge, I asked for Mademoiselle Bahker, and was directed to go through the courtyard into a back passageway, up the stairs, where I would find Mademoiselle Bahker, troisième à gauche. I followed these instructions and knocked at the door. Martha, herself, opened it.
Oh, Carl, it's you! I'm so glad to see you!
Martha had not changed. She and even her studio were much as they had been in Chicago. She is dead now, dead possibly of a broken heart; certainly she was never happy. Her Insouciance, the portrait of Elizabeth Buehrmann, in a green cloth dress trimmed with fur, and a miniature or two hang in the Art Institute in Chicago, but during her lifetime she never received the kind of appreciation she really craved. She had an uncanny talent for portraiture, a talent which in some respects I have never seen equalled by any of her coevals. Artists, as a matter of fact, generally either envied or admired her. Her peculiar form of genius lay in the facility with which she caught her sitters' weaknesses. Possibly this is the reason she did not sell more
