skin flushed with red, gleaming teeth, snapping eyes, supple, her beauty all of rounded curves, altogether quite a contrast to Madame's elegant simplicity, in a light flowered waist with cheap lace about the shoulders. Her English was quaint, entertaining. She spoke with pouted lips; I dare say she knew how becoming it was. But when she laughed it was such a clear limpid sound in the sultry evening that I felt as though I were near a brook and could plunge my hand into cool water. It was good to watch her as she sat there against a creamwhite doorway, her black hair softened against it in a bluish penumbra, and the gold braid on her waist shaking off flakes of light as her bosom rose and fell with laughter.

"Madame is married a long while?' I asked her once.
""The signora? Five or six year.'

"But of good family.'

"Oh, ye-es. They run away-her fathaire is rich with wine. He forgeeve a leetle and send them some to sell.'

"But the signora is so quiet.'

"Guiseppa glanced at the figure sitting in the doorway. 'She is always so, always sad,' and then, leaning forward, added with a confiding giggle, 'and dried up.'

"But then the signora is a marvelous cook,' I began, by way of deprecating Guiseppa's exuberance. But she drew herself up proudly and threw back her head so that the light glowed on her pursed-up lips. She act alway the fine lady. The cooking, everything that is fine here, is by me.' And with panther-like grace she darted into the

next room.

"A few evenings later, when Madame conferred her weekly decoration of wistaria, I saw how wonderful her eyes were, blue-gray, made richer and softer by a delicate rim about the iris. Most people would have thought them merely wistful. But I saw hunger in them, motherhunger, and then came my idea for painting her.

"When Stratham heard it his first remark was, 'Good, paint her just as she sits there every evening, black waist against the purplish white fence, with a bit of deeper purple in the wistaria in the back

ground.' Then I told him I intended to paint Madame in a soft, subtle twilight. I remember his exact words, 'Bob, there you go; forever peering around into the gloom.'

"Boldini was very acquiescent in giving permission for the sittings. 'You do me honnaire,' he said. Guiseppa's laugh gurgled somewhere in a dark corner of the room. I thought I saw his flabby eyes give a start.

"Stratham let me have a room next to his studio where he usually kept his casts. And there I painted her as she sat in a twilight corner. Now and then through the open window sounded Guiseppa's laughter occasionally intermingled with the ringing note of a man's. Whether Madame noticed or not, I never knew. I dare say she wouldn't have let me know in any case. The portrait came on, but when I had to have her stretch out her hands, and confessed that my picture was a madonna, her fingers trembled for a minute, and her finely modeled lips quivered. It was over in an instant, but I concluded that she lived with the memory of a dead child. What disconcerted me, though, was that at times, when I looked up suddenly, I saw her smile sadly, condescendingly almost, as if she were humoring me in some quaint conceit.

"One evening in September I showed the portrait to Strotham. It was time for me to get back across the river and begin my autumn work, but I was determined to stay over, get Strotham to borrow a baby from somewhere in the neighborhood and finish my madonna. He grinned. 'Boldini expects a son. He prays regularly these days with a great expenditure of wax candles.'

"So I left my madonna in Strotham's studio. The summer was well along when I dropped in on him again. Getting canvases into shape for my first and last exhibit had kept me late. The clay figures had been shoved aside; Strotham had found himself and was beginning to do all those splendid vigorous pictures that have made a name for him. And there framed, on an easel, the varnish hardly dry, was the new, the real, the finished madonna-Guiseppa-just as I had seen her, her hair, with its blurred edges, melting into the white door glow

ing under the light, the face of rich pinks and browns subdued in half shadow, the gold braid on her bosom gleaming, her lips pursed up in pride, this time of a baby she clasped to her."

Marvel paused and stared at a litter of crumpled paper and burnt matches in the grate. "And the painting," he continued, "was as superb, as sure, as effortless, as Guiseppa's laugh. It seemed almost as much an expression of sheer exuberance. I took my madonna out and leaned it againt the wall. She seemed so frail and thin and weak, groping for the spectre child beneath her fingers.

"And that night Madame Boldini killed herself. They found her hanging from a branch of the elm in the yard. She must have stood on one of the tables and then kicked it from under her. The clamor awoke us, of course. I can remember her limp figure hanging there, a silhouette against a halo of lantern light. Some terrified old man was saying his prayers in a high, grating voice that trembled into falsetto. It bored through me like a fine wire.

"That's why they cut down the tree; you can see the stump there now. I showed it to you before. Of course Boldini cleared out soon after that. They say he married Guiseppa."

There was another longer pause as Marvel reached for his pipe, lit it, and threw the match into the grate. The papers flared up for a few moments and left the room a little duller and more cheerless than before.

"Yes, I knew it then when I saw the madonnas side by side. I might have known then why my exhibit was going to fail. For Strotham and Guiseppa and even Boldini - yes, even he, with his coarse fat hands-life speaks in them. They reach out and accomplish their desire. They can. And Strotham's unerring color-simply part of the same thing. But Madame Boldini and I, and all the rest of us, we're made imperfect, we're born, as Strotham put it, to peer into the gloom. Our lips narrow in bitterness. We stand just as she stands there in the canvas, groping in the twilight for things we cannot find."

Lee Simonson.

SUNDAY EVENING IN THE COMMON

I

Look-on the topmost branches of the world

The blossoms of the myriad stars are thick, Over the huddled rows of stone and brick A few, sad wisps of empty smoke are curled, Like ghosts, languid and sick!

II

One breathless moment now the city's moaning
Fades, and the endless streets seem vague and dim,
There is no sound around the whole world's rim,
Save in the distance a small band is droning

Some desolate, old hymn.

III

Edwin-how often have we been together

When this same moment made all mysteries clear,
The infinite stars that brood above us here

And the gray city in the soft, June weather,
So tawdry and so dear!

John Hall Wheelock.

LEN

It was not the least of Len's misfortunes that he was born a generation too late, when people who had lived through the war were indifferent because they "had seen so many of them," and people who had not were impelled to laugh at his "peculiarity." There had been, indeed, "many of them" in the twenty-five years following the war, scattered in those parts of the South where the fighting had been fiercest and the destruction of life and of property greatest, and in those years women always sighed and shivered when they saw children like him, and looked at them pityingly-and men squared their jaws and stopped in passing to say a kind word to the children and to lift their hats to the mothers. But the tragedy of minds which could never develop was not poignant to the children of the late eighties, nor to the adults for that matter, who had begun even then to tell the horrible stories of the war with a certain unction and much exaggeration, as though the events they spoke of had not been the most active, the most dramatic, and often the most tragic factors in their lives.

And it was in the late eighties that Len was ushered into the world—a thin, sickly baby, with a deep gash across his right cheek. No one ever knew the cause of that gash except his mother, and she never told; but Len was born just three months after his father had shot himself—and when Lucile was two years old. The child didn't learn to speak until he was five years old, and he never spoke distinctly -his words were always jumbled and muttered. During his infancy. he had "spells" frequently-"spells" of such inexpressible suffering that he writhed in fearful agony, and screamed as though he were being torn upon the rack.

The two sides of him were very pronounced in his boyhood-the barbarian side, crude, fierce, tempestuous, reckless, wild; the childish