bly suited his youthful, round, broad-cheekboned
countenance framed in bright hair banged like a girl's. June had known
him three weeks, and he still seemed to her the principal embodiment of
genius, and hope of the future; a sort of Star of the East which had
strayed into an unappreciative West. Until that evening he had
conversationally confined himself to recording his impressions of the
United States, whose dust he had just shaken from off his feet--a
country, in his opinion, so barbarous in every way that he had sold
practically nothing there, and become an object of suspicion to the
police; a country, as he said, without a race of its own, without
liberty, equality, or fraternity, without principles, traditions,
taste, without--in a word--a soul. He had left it for his own good, and
come to the only other country where he could live well. June had dwelt
unhappily on him in her lonely moments, standing before his
creations--frightening, but powerful and symbolic once they had been
explained! That he, haloed by bright hair like an early Italian
painting, and absorbed in his genius to the exclusion of all else--the
only sign of course by which real genius could be told--should still be
a "lame duck" agitated her warm heart almost to the exclusion of Paul
Post. And she had begun to take steps to clear her Gallery, in order to
fill it with Strumolowski masterpieces. She had at once encountered
trouble. Paul Post had kicked; Vospovitch had stung. With all the
emphasis of a genius which she did not as yet deny them, they had
demanded another six weeks at least of her Gallery. The American
stream, still flowing in, would soon be flowing out. The American
stream was their right, their only hope, their salvation--since nobody
in this "beastly" country cared for Art. June had yielded to the
demonstration. After all Boris would not mind their having the full
benefit of an American stream, which he himself so violently despised.

This evening she had put that to Boris with nobody else present, except
Hannah Hobdey, the mediaeval black-and-whitist, and Jimmy Portugal,
editor of the Neo-Artist. She had put it to him with that sudden
confidence which continual contact with the neo-artistic world had
never been able to dry up in her warm and generous nature. He had not
broken his Christlike silence, however, for more than two minutes
before she began to move her blue eyes from side to side, as a cat
moves its tail. This--he said--