A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
Half-way up the hill lay the Square. The streets that bounded it on north and south sloped westward to the river. On the east they climbed the hill and disappeared. The elm trees and the ragged willow in the centre of the Square were gray with dust. It was late September.
The place had an air peculiarly its own, representing, in its dignified seclusion, the ideal aspects of an old New England city. Long ago wealthy merchants had built these wide brick houses. Now artists, poets, scholars, and musicians, the builders of houses not made with hands, had become inheritors of the large rooms, with windows overlooking the roofs and chimneys of the city and the winding river in the west.
Late one afternoon Anne Bradford walked slowly home. A sleepy quiet brooded over the Square. Suddenly the silence was broken by the sound of many feet, for the doors of the Music Hall had been thrown open, and a crowd of women passed out. A lecture on Dostoievsky was just over. Then a cab came rattling down High Street and stopped at the entrance to a low, irregular structure bearing the inscription, "Rembrandt Studios." From the cab stepped a tall young girl in an extremely well-cut gown. She stood for a minute with her red-brown dress and auburn hair outlined against the dull green ampelopsis that covered the building's front. Her cheeks were flushed. Anne Bradford caught her look of keen interest in the faded brick façade, the battered stone lions that guarded the entrance, and in the preoccupied women passing two by two.
"What is that child doing in Bohemia?" wondered Anne, noticing that her trunk was being carried in. "It is somebody new in search of the ideal life. She ought to know that she cannot enter the kingdom of the ideal in clothes like that."
The girl disappeared behind the great oak door. Anne followed, pausing for a minute to bow to some one across the Square. It was a lady in widow's dress. Something in the slender, erect figure with the sweeping black robes smote the artist's heart with a sudden sense of pity.
"I wish I knew more about Mrs. Kent," she said to herself.
A polite voice interrupted her.
"If you please 'm, I've brought home your laundry, and could you pay me now?"
A child stepped forward from the stairs, watching Miss Bradford expectantly. She was an odd little creature. The business-like manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the plump cheeks and the short calico gown.
"Yes, Annabel, I am going up directly."
"There's a new young lady," whispered Annabel confidentially. "Her name's Miss Wistar. I saw it on her trunk and she smiled at me. She's awful pretty."
Anne Bradford slowly mounted the stairs, carrying in one hand a tiny bag of rolls for her breakfast, in the other, three new tubes of paint.