Miss Burns took out her little purse, refusing to let Frederick pay for her, and they stepped out again into the busy streets.
"By Jove," said Frederick, whose manner when in the hurly-burly changed completely, "what a lot of stuff I have been chattering! I deserve to be punished for trying your patience to such an extent. I must have bored you horribly."
"Oh, no," she said, "I am accustomed to such conversations. I have associated with artists for many years."
"Do you mean to impugn my truthfulness, Miss Burns?" Frederick asked in some alarm.
"No, but I think," she said calmly, with almost masculine firmness, "that if nature makes us suffer through something, she does not intend us to suffer again and again from the same thing. It seems to me the Creator had a definite intention in always and everywhere placing night and sleep between day and day."
"Not always and not everywhere," Frederick observed, thinking of the difficulty he had had for many nights in snatching a few hours' sleep.
At a street crossing Miss Burns stopped to wait for a car to take her back to the studio.
"Look at that," said Frederick, pointing to six similar placards of gigantic dimensions, which represented Mara, the Spider's Victim, in screaming colours. A green stripe was pasted slantwise on each placard, announcing that the dancer had been suffering from the consequences of the shipwreck, but that she would appear at Webster and Forster's the next day for the first time in America. Above the advertisement on the same wall were seven or eight full-length pictures of Arthur Stoss larger than life-size.
"Your little friend invited Mr. Ritter to a rehearsal in a theatre on Broadway day after to-morrow. It was not Webster and Forster's," said Miss Burns. Frederick explained what had happened in connection with Mr. Lilienfeld, though he himself had not known of the intended rehearsal.
"I feel nothing but pity for that girl," he said lightly. "As a result of a strange combination of circumstances, I feel I am responsible for her. She lost her father, who was all in all to her, since she is not on good terms with her mother."
"Indeed?" said Miss Burns. "Why, this very morning in a short conversation in the studio, she told me something very different."
"She did!" exclaimed Frederick.
"She told me that in many ways her father had been a fearful burden to her. In the first place, she had to earn money for him, and then he tyrannised over her terribly."
"Well," said Frederick, somewhat confused, "it is perhaps the essence of perversion that a person feels compelled to hoodwink people by doing things and making statements the very reverse of what is natural and what is to be expected. Miss Burns, I wish, I heartily wish, you would look out a little for that poor creature drifting about without anybody or anything to guide her."
"Good-bye," said Miss Burns, hailing a car. "Come and start work in the studio as soon as possible. As for your little friend, she is too self-willed. In fact, she has an iron will. There is no holding her, or leading her, that would keep her from doing anything she had once made up her mind to do."
When the car had carried Miss Burns off into the stream of New York traffic, Frederick, strangely enough, had a fleeting sense of forlornness, to him a novel sensation. Feeling inclined to taste it to the full, he continued to walk the streets alone, choosing his way at random. For the first time after speaking so freely to a comparative stranger, he did not regret his conduct. Again and again he went over in his mind his first meeting with Miss Burns in the studio, her manner during the lively carousal, when they discussed the wooden Madonna, his second meeting with her on the street, her upright carriage, her proud eyes, her imposing appearance in the little cosmopolitan restaurant. Without intending to, she undeniably dominated her surroundings, and that merely as a result of her naturalness. It had given Frederick secret pleasure to watch her eat and drink daintily, yet heartily, without any airs or graces, and systematically dissect her orange and peel her apple. Eating and drinking was to her a noble, legitimate and also inevitable act, not to be disposed of lightly beneath a foolish masquerade. When Frederick recommended Ingigerd to her guidance, he did so because he himself had experienced a beneficent influence from her remarks, dictated by a beautiful intellect, and from the glance of her straight, honest, scrutinising eyes.
"At the risk of making myself ridiculous," he said to himself, "I will go to Ritter's studio to-morrow morning, bury my hands in the clay, and try to reconstruct my life again from the bottom up out of moist clay."