Adrienne Lescott was in Europe. Soon, she would return, and Horton
meant to show that he had not buried his talent.
* * * * * For eight months Samson's life had run in the steady ascent of gradual
climbing, but, in the four months from the first of August to the first
of December, the pace of his existence suddenly quickened. He left off
drawing from plaster casts, and went into a life class. His shyness
secretly haunted him. The nudity of the woman posing on the model
throne, the sense of his own almost as naked ignorance, and the dread
of the criticism to come, were all keen embarrassments upon him.
In this period, Samson had his first acquaintanceship with women,
except those he had known from childhood--and his first
acquaintanceship with the men who were not of his own art world. Of the
women, he saw several sorts. There were the aproned and frowsy
students, of uncertain age, who seemed to have no life except that
which existed under studio skylights. There were, also, a few younger
girls, who took their art life with less painful solemnity; and, of
course, the models in the "partially draped" and the "altogether."
Tony Collasso was an Italian illustrator, who lodged and painted in
studio-apartments in Washington Square, South. He had studied in the
Julian School and the Beaux Arts, and wore a shock of dark curls, a
Satanic black mustache, and an expression of Byronic melancholy. The
melancholy, he explained to Samson, sprang from the necessity of
commercializing his divine gift. His companions were various, numbering
among them a group of those pygmy celebrities of whom one has never
heard until by chance he meets them, and of whom their intimates speak
as of immortals.
To Collasso's studio, Samson was called one night by telephone. He had
sometimes gone there before to sit for an hour, chiefly as a listener,
while the man from Sorrento bewailed fate with his coterie, and
denounced all forms of government, over insipid Chianti. Sometimes, an
equally melancholy friend in soiled linen and frayed clothes took up
his violin, and, as he improvised, the noisy group would fall silent.
At such moments, Samson would ride out on the waves of melody, and see
again the velvet softness of the mountain night, with stars hanging
intimately close, and hear the ripple of Misery and a voice for which
he longed.
But, to-night, he entered the door to find himself in the midst of a
gay and boisterous party. The room was already thickly fogged with
smoke, and a dozen men and women, singing snatches of current airs,
were interesting themselves over a chafing dish. The studio of Tony
Collasso was of fair size, and adorned with many unframed paintings,
chiefly his own, and a few good tapestries and bits of bric-à-brac
variously jettisoned from the sea of life in which he had drifted. The
crowd itself was typical. A few very minor writers and artists, a model
or two, and several women who had thinking parts in current Broadway
productions.