# So Big/Chapter 18

XVIII
PAULA had a scheme for interesting women in bond buying. It was a good scheme. She suggested it so that Dirk thought he had thought of it. Dirk was head now of the bond department in the Great Lakes Trust Company’s magnificent new white building on Michigan Boulevard north. Its white towers gleamed pink in the lake mists. Dirk said it was a terrible building, badly proportioned, and that it looked like a vast vanilla sundae. His new private domain was more like a splendid bookless library than a business office. It was finished in rich dull walnut and there were great upholstered chairs, soft rugs, shaded lights. Special attention was paid to women clients. There was a room for their convenience fitted with low restful chairs and couches, lamps, writing desks, in mauve and rose. Paula had selected the furnishings for this room. Ten years earlier it would have been considered absurd in a suite of business offices. Now it was a routine part of the equipment.
Dirk’s private office was almost as difficult of access as that of the nation’s executive. Cards, telephones, office boys, secretaries stood between the caller and Dirk DeJong, head of the bond department. You ​asked for him, uttering his name in the ear of the six-foot statuesque detective who, in the guise of usher, stood in the centre of the marble rotunda eyeing each visitor with a coldly appraising gaze. This one padded softly ahead of you on rubber heels, only to give you over to the care of a glorified office boy who took your name. You waited. He returned. You waited. Presently there appeared a young woman with inquiring eyebrows. She conversed with you. She vanished. You waited. She reappeared. You were ushered into Dirk DeJong’s large and luxurious inner office. And there formality fled.
Dirk was glad to see you; quietly, interestedly glad to see you. As you stated your business he listened attentively, as was his charming way. The volume of business done with women clients by the Great Lakes Trust Company was enormous. Dirk was conservative, helpful—and he always got the business. He talked little. He was amazingly effective. Ladies in the modish black of recent bereavement made quite a sombre procession to his door. His suggestions (often originating with Paula) made the Great Lakes Trust Company’s discreet advertising rich in results. Neat little pamphlets written for women on the subjects of saving, investments. “You are not dealing with a soulless corporation,” said these brochures. “May we serve you? You need more than friends. Before acting, you should have your judgment vindicated by an organization of investment specialists. You may have relatives and friends, some of whom ​would gladly advise you on investments. But perhaps you rightly feel that the less they know about your financial affairs, the better. To handle trusts, and to care for the securities of widows and orphans, is our business.”
It was startling to note how this sort of thing mounted into millions. “Women are becoming more and more used to the handling of money,” Paula said, shrewdly. “Pretty soon their patronage is going to be as valuable as that of men. The average woman doesn’t know about bonds—about bond buying. They think they’re something mysterious and risky. They ought to be educated up to it. Didn’t you say something, Dirk, about classes in finance for women? You could make a sort of semi-social affair of it. Send out invitations and get various bankers—big men, whose names are known—to talk to these women.”
“But would the women come?”
“Of course they’d come. Women will accept any invitation that’s engraved on heavy cream paper.”
The Great Lakes Trust had a branch in Cleveland now, and one in New York, on Fifth Avenue. The drive to interest women in bond buying and to instruct them in finance was to take on almost national proportions. There was to be newspaper and magazine advertising.
The Talks for Women on the Subject of Finance were held every two weeks in the crystal room of the Blackstone and were a great success. Paula was right. Much of old Aug Hempel’s shrewdness and business ​foresight had descended to her. The women came—widows with money to invest; business women who had thriftily saved a portion of their salaries; moneyed women who wanted to manage their own property, or who resented a husband’s interference. Some came out of curiosity. Others for lack of anything better to do. Others to gaze on the well-known banker or lawyer or business man who was scheduled to address the meeting. Dirk spoke three or four times during the winter and was markedly a favourite. The women, in smart crêpe gowns and tailored suits and small chic hats, twittered and murmured about him, even while they sensibly digested his well-thought-out remarks. He looked very handsome, clean-cut, and distinguished there on the platform in his admirably tailored clothes, a small white flower in his buttonhole. He talked easily, clearly, fluently; answered the questions put to him afterward with just the right mixture of thoughtful hesitation and confidence.
It was decided that for the national advertising there must be an illustration that would catch the eye of women, and interest them. The person to do it, Dirk thought, was this Dallas O’Mara whose queer hen-track signature you saw scrawled on half the advertising illustrations that caught your eye. Paula had not been enthusiastic about this idea.
“M-m-m, she’s very good,” Paula had said, guardedly, “but aren’t there others who are better?”
“She!” Dirk had exclaimed. “Is it a woman? I didn’t know. That name might be anything.”
​“Oh, yes, she’s a woman. She’s said to be very—very attractive.”
Dirk sent for Dallas O’Mara. She replied, suggesting an appointment two weeks from that date. Dirk decided not to wait, consulted other commercial artists, looked at their work, heard their plans outlined, and was satisfied with none of them. The time was short. Ten days had passed. He had his secretary call Dallas O’Mara on the telephone. Could she come down to see him that day at eleven?
No: she worked until four daily at her studio.
Could she come to his office at four-thirty, then?
Yes, but wouldn’t it be better if he could come to her studio where he could see something of the various types of drawings—oils, or black-and-white, or crayons. She was working mostly in crayons now.
All this relayed by his secretary at the telephone to Dirk at his desk. He jammed his cigarette-end viciously into a tray, blew a final infuriated wraith of smoke, and picked up the telephone connection on his own desk. “One of those damned temperamental near-artists trying to be grand,” he muttered, his hand over the mouthpiece. “Here, Miss Rawlings—I’ll talk to her. Switch her over.”
“Hello, Miss—uh—O’Mara. This is Mr. De Jong talking. I much prefer that you come to my office and talk to me.” (No more of this nonsense.)
Her voice: “Certainly, if you prefer it. I thought the other would save us both some time. I'll be ​there at four-thirty.” Her voice was leisurely, low, rounded. An admirable voice. Restful.
“Very well. Four-thirty,” said Dirk, crisply. Jerked the receiver onto the hook. That was the way to handle ’em. These females of forty with straggling hair and a bundle of drawings under their arm.
The female of forty with straggling hair and a bundle of drawings under her arm was announced at four-thirty to the dot. Dirk let her wait five minutes in the outer office, being still a little annoyed. At four-thirty-five there entered his private office a tall slim girl in a smart little broadtail jacket, fur-trimmed skirt, and a black hat at once so daring and so simple that even a man must recognize its French nativity. She carried no portfolio of drawings under her arms.
Through the man’s mind flashed a series of unbusinesslike thoughts such as: “Gosh!. . . Eyes! . . . That’s way I like to see girl dress. . . Tired looking. . . No, guess it’s her eyes—sort of fatigued.. . . Pretty. . . No, she isn’t. . . yes, she. . .” Aloud he said, “This is very kind of you, Miss O’Mara.” Then he thought that sounded pompous and said, curtly, “Sit down.”
Miss O’Mara sat down. Miss O’Mara looked at him with her tired deep blue eyes. Miss O’Mara said nothing. She regarded him pleasantly, quietly, composedly. He waited for her to say that usually she did not come to business offices; that she had only twenty minutes to give him; that the day was warm, or ​cold; his office handsome; the view over the river magnificent. Miss O’Mara said nothing, pleasantly. So Dirk began to talk, rather hurriedly.
Now, this was a new experience for Dirk DeJong. Usually women spoke to him first and fluently. Quiet women waxed voluble under his silence; voluble women chattered. Paula always spoke a hundred words to his one. But here was a woman more silent than he; not sullenly silent, nor heavily silent, but quietly, composedly, restfully silent.
“I'll tell you the sort of thing we want, Miss O’Mara.” He told her. When he had finished she probably would burst out with three or four plans. The others had done that.
When he had finished she said, “I'll think about it for a couple of days while I’m working on something else. I always do. I’m doing an olive soap picture now. I can begin work on yours Wednesday.”
“But I’d like to see it—that is, I’d like to have an idea of what you’re planning to do with it.” Did she think he was going to let her go ahead without consulting his judgment!
“Oh, it will be all right. But drop into the studio if you like. It will take me about a week, I suppose. I’m over on Ontario in that old studio building. You'll know it by the way most of the bricks have fallen out of the building and are scattered over the sidewalk.” She smiled a slow wide smile. Her teeth were good but her mouth was too big, he thought. Nice big warm kind of smile, though. He found ​himself smiling, too, sociably. Then he became business like again. Very businesslike.
“How much do you—what is your—what would you expect to get for a drawing such as that?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” said Miss O’Mara.
“‘Nonsense.” He looked at her then. Perhaps that had been humour. But she was not smiling. “You mean fifteen hundred for a single drawing?”
“For that sort of thing, yes.”
“I’m afraid we can’t pay that, Miss O’Mara.”
Miss O’Mara stood up. “That is my price.” She was not at all embarrassed. He realized that he had never seen such effortless composure. It was he who was fumbling with the objects on his flat-topped desk-a pen, a sheet of paper, a blotter. “Good-bye, Mr.—DeJong.” She held out a friendly hand. He took it. Her hair was gold—dull gold, not bright—and coiled in a single great knot at the back of her head, low. He took her hand. The tired eyes looked up at him.
“Well, if that’s your price, Miss O’Mara. I wasn’t prepared to pay any such—but of course I suppose you top-notchers do get crazy prices for your work.”
“Not any crazier than the prices you top-notchers get.”
“Still, fifteen hundred dollars is quite a lot of money.”
“I think so, too. But then, I'll always think anything over nine dollars is quite a lot of money. You ​see, I used to get twenty-five cents apiece for sketching hats for Gage’s.”
She was undeniably attractive. “And now you've arrived. You're successful.”
“Arrived! Heavens, no! I’ve started.”
“Who gets more money than you do for a drawing?”
“Nobody, I suppose.”
“Well, then?”
“Well, then, in another minute I'll be telling you the story of my life.”
She smiled again her slow wide smile; turned to leave. Dirk decided that while most women’s mouths were merely features this girl’s was a decoration.
She was gone. Miss Ethelinda Quinn et al., in the outer office, appraised the costume of Miss Dallas O’ Mara from her made-to-order footgear to her made-in-France millinery and achieved a lightning mental reconstruction of their own costumes. Dirk DeJong in the inner office realized that he had ordered a fifteen-hundred-dollar drawing, sight unseen, and that Paula was going to ask questions about it.
“Make a note, Miss Rawlings, to call Miss O’Mara’s studio on Thursday.”
In the next few days he learned that a surprising lot of people knew a surprisingly good deal about this Dallas O’Mara. She hailed from Texas, hence the absurd name. She was twenty-eight—twenty-five—thirty-two—thirty-six. She was beautiful. She was ugly. She was an orphan. She had worked her way through art school. She had no sense of the value of ​money. Two years ago she had achieved sudden success with her drawings. Her ambition was to work in oils. She toiled like a galley-slave; played like a child; had twenty beaux and no lover; her friends, men and women, were legion and wandered in and out of her studio as though it were a public thoroughfare. You were likely to find there at any hour any one from Bert Colson, the blackface musical comedy star, to Mrs. Robinson Gilman of Lake Forest and Paris; from Leo Mahler, first violin with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, to Fanny Whipple who designed dresses for Carson’s. She supported an assortment of unlucky brothers and spineless sisters in Texas and points west.
Miss Rawlings made an appointment for Thursday at three. Paula said she’d go with him and went. She dressed for Dallas O’Mara and the result was undeniably enchanting. Dallas sometimes did a crayon portrait, or even attempted one in oils. Had got a prize for her portrait of Mrs. Robinson Gilman at last spring’s portrait exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute. It was considered something of an achievement to be asked to pose for her. Paula’s hat had been chosen in deference to her hair and profile, and the neck line of her gown in deference to hat, hair, and profile, and her pearls with an eye to all four. The whole defied competition on the part of Miss Dallas O’Mara.
Miss Dallas O’Mara, in her studio, was perched on a high stool before an easel with a large tray of assorted crayons at her side. She looked a sight and ​didn’t care at all. She greeted Dirk and Paula with a cheerful friendliness and went right on working. A model, very smartly gowned, was sitting for her.
“Hello!” said Dallas O’Mara. “This is it. Do you think you’re going to like it?”
“Oh,” said Dirk. “Is that it?” It was merely the beginning of a drawing of the smartly gowned model. “Oh, that’s it, is it?” Fifteen hundred dollars!
“I hope you didn’t think it was going to be a picture of a woman buying bonds.” She went on working. She squinted one eye, picked up a funny little mirror thing which she held to one side, looked into, and put down. She made a black mark on the board with a piece of crayon then smeared the mark with her thumb. She had on a faded all-enveloping smock over which French ink, rubber cement, pencil marks, crayon dust and wash were so impartially distributed that the whole blended and mixed in a rich mellow haze like the Chicago atmosphere itself. The collar of a white silk blouse, not especially clean, showed above this. On her feet were soft kid bedroom slippers, scuffed, with pompons on them. Her dull gold hair was carelessly rolled into that great loose knot at the back. Across one cheek was a swipe of black.
“Well,” thought Dirk, “she looks a sight.”
Dallas O’Mara waved a friendly hand toward some chairs on which were piled hats, odd garments, bristol board and (on the broad arm of one) a piece of yellow cake. “Sit down.” She called to the girl who, ​had opened the door to them: “Gilda, will you dump some of those things. This is Mrs. Storm, Mr. De Jong—Gilda Hanan.” Her secretary, Dirk later learned.
The place was disorderly, comfortable, shabby. A battered grand piano stood in one corner. A great skylight formed half the ceiling and sloped down at the north end of the room. A man and a girl sat talking earnestly on the couch in another corner. A swarthy foreign-looking chap, vaguely familiar to Dirk, was playing softly at the piano. The telephone rang. Miss Hanan took the message, transmitted it to Dallas O’Mara, received the answer, repeated it. Perched atop the stool, one slippered foot screwed in a rung, Dallas worked on concentratedly, calmly, earnestly. A lock of hair straggled over her eyes. She pushed it back with her wrist and left another dark splotch on her forehead. There was something splendid, something impressive, something magnificent about her absorption, her indifference to appearance, her unawareness of outsiders, her concentration on the work before her. Her nose was shiny. Dirk hadn’t seen a girl with a shiny nose in years. They were always taking out those little boxes and things and plastering themselves with the stuff in ’em.
“How can you work with all this crowd around?”
“Oh,” said Dallas in that deep restful leisurely voice of hers, “there are always between twenty and thirty”—she slapped a quick scarlet line on the board, rubbed it out at once—“thousand people in ​and out of here every hour, just about. I like it. Friends around me while I’m slaving.”
“Gosh!” he thought, “‘she’s——I don’t know—she’s——”
“Shall we go?” said Paula.
He had forgotten all about her. “Yes. Yes, I’m ready if you are.”
Outside, “Do you think you’re going to like the picture?” Paula asked. They stepped into her car.
“Oh, I don’t know. Can’t tell much about it at this stage, I suppose.”
“Back to your office?”
“Sure.”
“Attractive, isn’t she?”
“Think so?”
So he was going to be on his guard, was he! Paula threw in the clutch viciously, jerked the lever into second speed. “Her neck was dirty.”
“Crayon dust,” said Dirk.
“Not necessarily,” replied Paula.
Dirk turned sideways to look at her. It was as though he saw her for the first time. She looked brittle, hard, artificial—small, somehow. Not in physique but in personality.
The picture was finished and delivered within ten days. In that time Dirk went twice to the studio in Ontario Street. Dallas did not seem to mind. Neither did she appear particularly interested. She was working hard both times. Once she looked as he had seen her on her first visit. The second time she had ​on a fresh crisp smock of faded yellow that was glorious with her hair; and high-heeled beige kid slippers, very smart. She was like a little girl who has just been freshly scrubbed and dressed in a clean pinafore, Dirk thought.
He thought a good deal about Dallas O’Mara. He found himself talking about her in what he assumed to be a careless offhand manner. He liked to talk about her. He told his mother of her. He could let himself go with Selina and he must have taken advantage of this for she looked at him intently and said: “I’d like to meet her. I’ve never met a girl like that.”
“I'll ask her if she’ll let me bring you up to the studio some time when you're in town.”
It was practically impossible to get a minute with her alone. That irritated him. People were always drifting in and out of the studio—queer, important, startling people; little, dejected, shabby people. An impecunious girl art student, red-haired and wistful, that Dallas was taking in until the girl got some money from home; a pearl-hung grand-opera singer who was condescending to the Chicago Opera for a fortnight. He did not know that Dallas played until he came upon her late one afternoon sitting at the piano in the twilight with Bert Colson, the blackface comedian. Colson sang those terrible songs about April showers bringing violets, and about mah Ma-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-my but they didn’t seem terrible when he sang them. There was about this lean, hollow-chested, ​sombre-eyed comedian a poignant pathos, a gorgeous sense of rhythm—a something unnameable that bound you to him, made you love him. In the theatre he came out to the edge of the runway and took the audience in his arms. He talked like a bootblack and sang like an angel. Dallas at the piano, he leaning over it, were doing “blues.” The two were rapt, ecstatic. I got the blues—I said the blues—I got the this or that—the somethingorother—blue—hoo-hoos. They scarcely noticed Dirk. Dallas had nodded when he came in, and had gone on playing. Colson sang the cheaply sentimental ballad as though it were the folksong of a tragic race. His arms were extended, his face rapt. As Dallas played the tears stood in her eyes. When they had finished, “Isn’t it a terrible song?” she said. “I’m crazy about it. Bert’s going to try it out to-night.”
“Who—uh—wrote it?” asked Dirk politely.
Dallas began to play again. “H’m? Oh, I did.” They were off once more. They paid no more attention to Dirk. Yet there was nothing rude about their indifference. They simply were more interested in what they were doing. He left telling himself that he wouldn’t go there again. Hanging around a studio. But next day he was back.
“Took here, Miss O’Mara,” he had got her alone for a second. “Look here, will you come out to dinner with me some time? And the theatre?”
“Love to.”
“When?” He was actually trembling.
​“To-night.” He had an important engagement. He cast it out of his life.
“To-night! That’s grand. Where do you want to dine? The Casino?” The smartest club in Chicago; a little pink stucco Italian box of a place on the Lake Shore Drive. He was rather proud of being in a position to take her there as his guest.
“Oh, no, I hate those arty little places. I like dining in a hotel full of all sorts of people. Dining in a club means you’re surrounded by people who're pretty much alike. Their membership in the club means they’re there because they are all interested in golf, or because they’re university graduates, or belong to the same political party or write, or paint, or have incomes of over fifty thousand a year, or something. I like ’em mixed up, higgledy-piggledy. A dining room full of gamblers, and insurance agents, and actors, and merchants, thieves, bootleggers, lawyers, kept ladies, wives, flaps, travelling men, millionaires—everything. That’s what I call dining out. Unless one is dining at a friend’s house, of course.” A rarely long speech for her.
“Perhaps,” eagerly, “you’ll dine at my little apartment some time. Just four or six of us, or even——”
“Perhaps.”
“Would you like the Drake to-night?”
“It looks too much like a Roman bath. The pillars scare me. Let’s go to the Blackstone. I'll always be sufficiently from Texas to think the Blackstone French room the last word in elegance.”
​They went to the Blackstone. The head waiter knew him. “Good evening, Mr. DeJong.” Dirk was secretly gratified. Then, with a shock, he realized that the head waiter was grinning at Dallas and Dallas was grinning at the head waiter. “Hello, André,” said Dallas.
“Good evening, Miss O’Mara.” The text of his greeting was correct and befitting the head waiter of the French room at the Blackstone. But his voice was lyric and his eyes glowed. His manner of seating her at a table was an enthronement.
At the look in Dirk’s eyes, “I met him in the army,” Dallas explained, “when I was in France. He’s a grand lad.”
“Were you in—what did you do in France?”
“Oh, odd jobs.”
Her dinner gown was very smart, but the pink ribbon strap of an under-garment showed untidily at one side. Her silk brassiere, probably. Paula would have ——but then, a thing like that was impossible in Paula’s perfection of toilette. He loved the way the gown cut sharply away at the shoulder to show her firm white arms. It was dull gold, the colour of her hair. This was one Dallas. There were a dozen—a hundred. Yet she was always the same. You never knew whether you were going to meet the gamin of the rumpled smock and the smudged face or the beauty of the little fur jacket. Sometimes Dirk thought she looked like a Swede hired girl with those high cheek bones of hers and her deep-set eyes and ​her large capable hands. Sometimes he thought she looked like the splendid goddesses you saw in paintings—the kind with high pointed breasts and gracious gentle pose—holding out a horn of plenty. There was about her something genuine and earthy and elemental. He noticed that her nails were short and not well cared for—not glittering and pointed and cruelly sharp and horridly vermilion, like Paula’s. That pleased him, too, somehow.
“Some oysters?” he suggested. “They’re perfectly safe here. Or fruit cocktail? Then breast of guinea hen under glass and an artichoke——”
She looked a little worried. “If you—suppose you take that. Me, I’d like a steak and some potatoes au gratin and a salad with Russian——”
“That’s fine!” He was delighted. He doubled that order and they consumed it with devastating thoroughness. She ate rolls. She ate butter. She made no remarks about the food except to say, once, that it was good and that she had forgotten to eat lunch because she had been so busy working. All this Dirk found most restful and refreshing. Usually, when you dined in a restaurant with a woman she said, “Oh, I’d love to eat one of those crisp little rolls!”
You said, “Why not?”
Invariably the answer to this was, “I daren’t! Goodness! A half pound at least. I haven’t eaten a roll with butter in a year.”
Again you said, “Why not?”
“Afraid I'll get fat.”
​Automatically, “You! Nonsense. You're just right.”
He was bored with these women who talked about their weight, figure, lines. He thought it in bad taste. Paula was always rigidly refraining from this or that. It made him uncomfortable to sit at the table facing her; eating his thorough meal while she nibbled fragile curls of Melba toast, a lettuce leaf, and half a sugarless grapefruit. It lessened his enjoyment of his own oysters, steak, coffee. He thought that she always eyed his food a little avidly, for all her expressed indifference to it. She was looking a little haggard, too.
“The theatre’s next door,” he said. “Just a step. We don’t have to leave here until after eight.”
“That's nice.” She had her cigarette with her coffee in a mellow sensuous atmosphere of enjoyment. He was talking about himself a good deal. He felt relaxed, at ease, happy.
“You know I’m an architect—at least, I was one. Perhaps that’s why I like to hang around your shop so. I get sort of homesick for the pencils and the drawing board—the whole thing.”
“Why did you give it up, then?”
“Nothing in it.”
“How do you mean—nothing in it?”
“No money. After the war nobody was building. Oh, I suppose if I’d hung on——”
“And then you became a banker, h’m? Well, there ought to be money enough in a bank.”
​He was a little nettled. “I wasn’t a banker—at first. I was a bond salesman.”
Her brows met in a little frown. Her eyebrows were thick and strongly marked and a little uneven and inclined to meet over her nose. Paula’s brows were a mere line of black—a carefully traced half-parenthesis above her unmysterious dark eyes. “I'd rather,” Dallas said, slowly, “plan one back door of a building that’s going to help make this town beautiful and significant than sell all the bonds that ever floated a—whatever it is that bonds are supposed to float.”
He defended himself. “I felt that way, too. But you see my mother had given me my education, really. She worked for it. I couldn’t go dubbing along, earning just enough to keep me. I wanted to give her things. I wanted——”
“Did she want those things? Did she want you to give up architecture and go into bonds?”
“Well—she—I don’t know that she exactly——” He was too decent—still too much the son of Selina DeJong—to be able to lie about that.
“You said you were going to let me meet her.”
“Would you let me bring her in? Or perhaps you'd even—would you drive out to the farm with me some day. She’d like that so much.”
“So would I.”
He leaned toward her, suddenly. “Listen, Dallas. What do you think of me, anyway?” He wanted to know. He couldn't stand not knowing any longer.
​“I think you’re a nice young man.”
That was terrible. “But I don’t want you to think I’m a nice young man. I want you to like me—a lot. Tell me, what haven't I got that you think I ought to have? Why do you put me off so many times? I never feel that I’m really near you. What is it I lack?” He was abject.
“Well, if you’re asking for it. I do demand of the people I see often that they possess at least a splash of splendour in their makeup. Some people are nine tenths splendour and one tenth tawdriness, like Gene Meran. And some are nine tenths tawdriness and one tenth splendour, like Sam Huebch. But some people are all just a nice even pink without a single patch of royal purple.”
“And that’s me, h’m?”
He was horribly disappointed, hurt, wretched. But a little angry, too. His pride. Why, he was Dirk DeJong, the most successful of Chicago’s younger men; the most promising; the most popular. After all, what did she do but paint commercial pictures for fifteen hundred dollars apiece?
“What happens to the men who fall in love with you? What do they do?”
Dallas stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “They usually tell me about it.”
“And then what?”
“Then they seem to feel better and we become great friends.”
“But don’t you ever fall in love with them?” Pretty ​damned sure of herself. “Don't you ever fall in love with them?”
“I almost always do,” said Dallas.
He plunged. “I could give you a lot of things you haven't got, purple or no purple.”
“I’m going to France in April. Paris.”
“What d’you mean! Paris. What for?”
“Study. I want to do portraits. Oils.”
He was terrified. “Can’t you do them here?”
“Oh, no. Not what I need. I have been studying here. I’ve been taking life-work three nights a week at the Art Institute, just to keep my hand in.”
“So that’s where you are, evenings.” He was strangely relieved. “Let me go with you some time, will you?” Anything. Anything.
She took him with her one evening, steering him successfully past the stern Irishman who guarded the entrance to the basement classrooms; to her locker, got into her smock, grabbed her brushes. She rushed down the hall. “Don’t talk,” she cautioned him. “It bothers them. I wonder what they’d think of my shop.” She turned into a small, cruelly bright, breathlessly hot little room, its walls whitewashed. Every inch of the floor space was covered with easels. Before them stood men and women, brushes in hand, intent. Dallas went directly to her place, fell to work at once. Dirk blinked in the strong light. He glanced at the dais toward which they were all gazing from time to time as they worked. On it lay a nude woman.
​To himself Dirk said in a sort of panic: “Why, say, she hasn’t got any clothes on! My gosh! this is fierce. She hasn’t got anything on!” He tried, meanwhile, to look easy, careless, critical. Strangely enough, he succeeded, after the first shock, not only in looking at ease, but feeling so. The class was doing the whole figure in oils.
The model was a moron with a skin like velvet and rose petals. She fell into poses that flowed like cream. Her hair was waved in wooden undulations and her nose was pure vulgarity and her earrings were drug-store pearls in triple strands but her back was probably finer than Helen’s and her breasts twin snowdrifts peaked with coral. In twenty minutes Dirk found himself impersonally interested in tone, shadows, colours, line. He listened to the low-voiced instructor and squinted carefully to ascertain whether that shadow on the model’s stomach really should be painted blue or brown. Even he could see that Dallas’s canvas was almost insultingly superior to that of the men and women about her. Beneath the flesh on her canvas there were muscles, and beneath those muscles blood and bone. You felt she had a surgeon’s knowledge of anatomy. That, Dirk decided, was what made her commercial pictures so attractive. The drawing she had done for the Great Lakes Trust Company’s bond department had been conventional enough in theme. The treatment, the technique, had made it arresting. He thought that if she ever did portraits in oils they would be vital and compelling ​portraits. But oh, he wished she didn’t want to do portraits in oils. He wished——
It was after eleven when they emerged from the Art Institute doorway and stood a moment together at the top of the broad steps surveying the world that lay before them. Dallas said nothing. Suddenly the beauty of the night rushed up and overwhelmed Dirk. Gorgeousness and tawdriness; colour and gloom. At the right the white tower of the Wrigley building rose wraithlike against a background of purple sky. Just this side of it a swarm of impish electric lights grinned their message in scarlet and white. In white:
TRADE AT
then blackness, while you waited against your will. In red:
THE FAIR
Blackness again. Then, in a burst of both colours, in bigger letters, and in a blaze that hurled itself at your eyeballs, momentarily shutting out tower, sky, and street:
SAVE MONEY
Straight ahead the hut of the Adams Street L station in midair was a Venetian bridge with the black canal of asphalt flowing sluggishly beneath. The reflection of cafeteria and cigar-shop windows on either side were slender shafts of light along the canal. An enchanting sight. Dirk thought suddenly that Dallas, ​was a good deal like that—like Chicago. A mixture of grandeur and cheapness; of tawdriness and magnificence; of splendour and ugliness.
“Nice,” said Dallas. A long breath. She was a part of all this.
“Yes.” He felt an outsider. “Want a sandwich? Are you hungry?”
“I'm starved.”
They had sandwiches and coffee at an all-night one-arm lunch room because Dallas said her face was too dirty for a restaurant and she didn’t want to bother to wash it. She was more than ordinarily companionable that night; a little tired; less buoyant and independent than usual. This gave her a little air of helplessness—of fatigue—that aroused all his tenderness. Her smile gave him a warm rush of pure happiness—until he saw her smile in exactly the same way at the pimply young man who lorded it over the shining nickel coffee container, as she told him that his coffee was grand.