AUGUSTUS DANA'S WIFE.
By LISCHEN M. MILLER.
IT WAS a surprise and something of a shock to us all when it was made known that the beautiful and brilliant Miss Sargent was going to be married to Augustus Dana.
Miss Sargent was far and away the brightest girl in our set. She came of an old Southern family whose blood was of the bluest, and had a modest fortune in her own right. She danced and sang and dressed to perfection, and rode as only a Southern woman can.
We were all in love with her, from big McArthurs, who was worth a million or so, and who owned a cattle ranch out in the Yellowstone country and a gold mine in Alaska, to little Tom Tresset, who did not have a cent to his name—but who, nevertheless, commanded respect on account of the marvelous things he could do with his brush. He was regarded as a coming man, a rising genius.
She might have had her choice of half a score of men with money or brains, or both, and she took—Augustus Dana.
She loved him. None of us doubted that. She was not the sort of a girl to marry without love—but the mystery of it was: Why? Why, or how, any woman with an ounce of gray matter could tolerate much less love such a blank idiot as Augustus Dana was something wholly beyond our comprehension. Of all the dumb fools that ever cumbered the earth he was the worst. True, he had a handsome enough face, barring its lack of expression, and a fairly good figure, and he managed to dress decently, thanks to a generous income and a treasure of a valet, but if he had a grain of sense or an atom of intellect not one of his friends or acquaintances ever found It out. "As dull as Dana," was a stock phrase among us.
How he got through college nobody knew, but get through he did, and drifted into society, where he became a fixture of just about as much force and influence as the brass knobs on a chandelier. One thing, however, he could do, and only one. He could draw with all the skill and correctness of an Andrea Delsarto, and he had a sort of gift for mixing colors. But he had no originality, and was absolutely ignorant of the first principles of art. His work was utterly lifeless and as correctly dull as himself. His studio—heaven save the mark—was crammed with faultless copies. But Miss Sargent believed in him. She said he had genius—that the world would awaken to a knowledge of this fact some day.
She was devoted to art. Not that she ever did anything in that line herself, you understand. She couldn't draw a cat so you could tell it from a cow, but she had the artistic temperament, and a finely educated taste. She knew a good thing when she saw it. That was why everybody was stricken breathless with amazement when she fell in love with Augustus Dana.
"She must be very far gone, indeed," Fisk remarked, when the news was talked over in the club, "if she can discover the earmarks of genius in those dead things Augustus Dana calls his pictures."
"If she wanted to marry an artist," gloomily meditated Tresset, "why didn't she take—"
"Tommy Tresset," Colton interrupted. "My dear boy, it's Dana himself she is in love with. She looks at his painting through love's magic glasses. Art doesn't stand the ghost of a chance when Cupid's in the field."
The engagement was brief. They were married quietly and went abroad for a year. "She'll be sick enough of his 'genius' by the time they get home," Fisk predicted. But presently rumors began to reach us concerning the remarkable success of an American artist in Rome. Then it was Paris, and the rumor took a more definite form, and came to read, "Dana, the American," who was agitating art circles in the Old World by reason of his wonderful paintings, which were said to rival in power and originality of conception the best works of the old masters.
