Page 67 - 1918 Hartridge

ot her friends to be in. She herself would still have been out if she had had a little more money. But after humping' her shins four times on the same “art object,” she suddenly remembered that the studio next door, long em\])ty, had been occupied just that day. She lost no time.
In response to her knock, a man in an artist’s smock opened the door. Before looking beyond him to the room’s wild confusion, Clar- isse decided that he was young, good-looking in a rather unusual way,
and assuredly an artist.
“Have you a match?” she asked.
“J suppose so,” he answered ruefully. “If you’ll just step over
these boxes and find a seat on anything that looks sittable. I ’ll see what I can do in the line of excavating. Are you in a hurry? It will take some time. . . . You see,” he went on, while Clarisse j)icked her
way to a stack of rugs, “I packed the little things myself, and I don’t remember whether the matches are with the tea-set or mv ties.”
And so the thing began that, from careless words in the hallway, developed into long chats over a dinner table. Payton Desbrosses perceived in Clarisse all the charm ever bestowed upon one woman, while Clarisse decided that even if Payton’s hair tvas unruly, his nose was good—very good. While you will notice that she was hardly as
enraptured about him as he was about her, you will admit that there was a beginning, at least.
One lovely Maj" afternoon, Clarisse’s charm was \])articularly evi­ dent to Payton, and he proposed that they share studios in future, or. if she didn’t like that, they might have a door knocked in the wall between. In other words, he wanted her to marry him. He had be­ come quite ardent, in spite of the difficulty of proposing on a crowded street, but Clarisse seemed to be listening only abstractedly.
“Clarisse,” he said, “do you hear me?”
They had stop\])ed in front of a florist’s window, in whose center was massed an exquisite bunch of pale pink apple blossoms. Clarisse tore her gaze away from them to look dreamily at Payton.
“Oh, Payton, she cried, “isn’t that the most heavenly thing you ever saw?”
He was about to make some verv romantic answer, but she cut
ft.
him short. ‘'They are exquisite. I can almost smell them. And oh,
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