Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/133

 with the inter-appreciation clique of rootless foreigners in the School of Paris.

Clem Brush had come home.

Leaving his beret hanging on the hall rack he put on an old grey felt of his father's. There was now warmth between neighbors and himself as he set out for the studio. Passing the gift shop next to the Women's Exchange on Brick Street he heard taps on the window and saw Widow Doremus beckoning excitedly.

"Oh, Mr. Brush, you're such an artist I want to show you something I know you'll enjoy. A little thing I just finished."

Planted before him and transfixing him, ardor glowing in brown eyes, she held against her palpitating bosom a painting slightly larger than his of the hepaticas under his arm.

A glazed black-blue vase holding a single half-blown pink rose had been drawn, erased, scrubbed into paper with panting short strokes, squeezed dry of any freshness by the fervor of the Widow Doremus in trying literally to capture the elusive contours of each petal.

"Pretty," Clem said lamely, mentally kicking himself for cowardice in withholding his actual opinion. Premonition of what his new style of painting might let him in for, even with Henkel and Larson, glazed his eyes.

But Widow Doremus read only admiration in his glassy stare. "I just knew you'd like it. You must show me some more of your paintings one of these days, we artists have to stick together."

What in hell brought that on! The woman's presumption was humiliating. Curious, she had kept her distance when he wore the beret.

In the close familiar dust of the studio, and despite the Widow Doremus, Clem's excitement returned the more he thought of what he was now certain was his discovery of an American way of painting. It was the first time he had entered the studio without uncertainty as to the value of the work of the day before.

Standing on a chair he pushed open with a yardstick a pane of the skylight to let out the stale smoke. Then he put on water for coffee as his repatriation to America did not excommunicate the Franco-Italian-South-American brew. Placing an 18 x 24 canvas on the easel the broad way he stepped back to scan its blank surface for a sign of the focal point at which to set the grey box with the Rh