Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/80



TORROW did not analyse his propulsion for flight. He had not even acknowledged it to be flight. But when, before the end of his week, he found a studio very much to his liking in a ruinous-fronted old building not far from Madison Square, in East Twenty- Fourth Street, he magnified that occasion into a chance which it would be calamitous to miss.

Two days later he moved back to the city. It was not, however, until the migration had been effected that he made an effort to unedge the precipitancy of his move- ments by a carefully worded note of explanation to Au- gusta Kirkner, a note which brought no response from the older woman. It was Charlotte, in fact, who three days later sent a brief but friendly letter back to Stor- row's studio, wishing him happiness in his new surround- ings and success in the work which she knew must mean so much to him.

Storrow, at the time, was too preoccupied to give much thought to this message. The slightly autumnal-looking and hollow-chested poster-artist from whom he was so precipitously releasing the huge sky-lighted room that was to be his home had accepted a call to draw fashion- plates for a Chicago mail-order house and was glad enough to dispose of her furniture en bloc. But she was less happy, Storrow realized, in leaving quarters with which, apparently, so much of her life had been linked. He found it easy enough to understand this, for already he could feel the appeal of the place. It was spacious, sequestered, amazingly quiet, a kernel of achieved com- 70