Van Berg's night-key admitted him to a beautiful home,which he now had wholly to himself,since his parents and sister had sailed for Europe early in the spring,intending to spend the summer abroad.The young man had already travelled and studied for years in the lands naturally attractive to an artist,and it was now his purpose to familiarize himself more thoroughly with the scenery of his own country.
On reaching his own apartment he took down a prosy book,that he might read himself into that condition of drowsiness which would render sleep possible;but sleep would not come,and the sentences were like the passers-by in the street,whom we see but do not note,and for whose coming and going we know not the reasons.Between himself and the page he saw continually the exquisite features and the exasperating face of Ida Mayhew.At last he threw aside the book,lighted a cigar,and gave himself up to the reveries to which this beautiful,but discordant visage so strongly predisposed him.
Its perfection in one respect,its strongly marked imperfection in another,both appealed equally to his artistic and thoughtful mind.At one moment it would appear before him with an ideal loveliness such as had never blessed the eye of his fancy even;but while he yet looked the features would distort themselves into the vivid expression of some contemptible trait,so like what he had seen in reality,during the evening,that,in uncontrollable irritation,he would start up and pace the floor.
His uncurbed imagination conjured up all kinds of weird and grotesque imagery.He found himself commiserating the girl's features as if they were high-toned captives held in degrading bondage by a spiteful little monster,that delighted to put them to low and menial uses.
To one of his temperament such beauty as he had just witnessed,controlled by,and ministering to,some of the meanest and pettiest of human vices,was like Mary Magdalene when held in thraldom by seven devils.
A cool and matter-of-fact person could scarcely understand Van Berg's annoyance and perturbation.If a true artist were compelled to see before him a portrait that required only a few skillful touches in order to become a perfect likeness,and yet could not give those touches,the picture would become a constant vexation;and the better the picture,the nearer it approached the truth,the deeper would be the irritation that all should be spoiled through defects for which there was no necessity.
In the face that persistently haunted him Van Berg saw a beauty that might fulfil his best ideal;and he also saw just why it did not and never could,until its defects were remedied.He felt a sense of personal loss that he should have discovered a gem so nearly perfect and yet marred by so fatal a flaw.
The next day it was still the same.The face of Ida Mayhew interposed itself before everything that he sought to do or see.Whether it were true or not,it appeared to him that in all his wanderings and observations he had never seen features so capable of fulfilling his highest conception of beauty did they but express the higher qualities and emotions of the soul.He also felt that never before had he seen a face that would seem to him so hideous in its perversion.
He threw down his brush and palette in despair and again gave himself up to his fancies.He then sketched in outline the beautiful face as expressing joy,hope,courage,thought or love,but was provoked to find that he ever obtained the best likeness when portraying the vanity,silliness,or petulance which had been the only characteristics he had seen.
He now grew metaphysical and tried to analyze the girl's mind.
He sought to grope mentally his way back into the recesses of the soul,which had looked,acted,and spoken the previous evening.
A strange little place he imagined it,and oddly furnished.It occurred to him that it bore a resemblance to her dressing room,and was full of queer feminine mysteries and artificial ideas that had been created by conventional society rather than inspired by nature.