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felt light, clear-headed, exhilarated by his own energy. When he had to consult

his library on a new drawing which he wished to compare with its best

prototypes, he walked out of his office, whistling, swinging the drawing gaily.

His motion had propelled him halfway across the reception room, when he stopped

short; the drawing swung forward and flapped back against his knees. He forgot

that it was quite improper for him to pause there like that in the

circumstances.

A young woman stood before the railing, speaking to the reception clerk. Her

slender body seemed out of all scale in relation to a normal human body; its

lines were so long, so fragile, so exaggerated that she looked like a stylized

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drawing of a woman and made the correct proportions of a normal being appear

heavy and awkward beside her. She wore a plain gray suit; the contrast between

its tailored severity and her appearance was deliberately exorbitant--and

strangely elegant. She let the fingertips of one hand rest on the railing, a

narrow hand ending the straight imperious line of her arm. She had gray eyes

that were not ovals, but two long, rectangular cuts edged by parallel lines of

lashes; she had an air of cold serenity and an exquisitely vicious mouth. Her

face, her pale gold hair, her suit seemed to have no color, but only a hint,

just on the verge of the reality of color, making the full reality seem vulgar.

Keating stood still, because he understood for the first time what it was that

artists spoke about when they spoke of beauty.

"I’ll see him now, if I see him at all," she was saying to the reception clerk.

"He asked me to come and this is the only time I have." It was not a command;

she spoke as if it were not necessary for her voice to assume the tones of

commanding.

"Yes, but..." A light buzzed on the clerk’s switchboard; she plugged the

connection through, hastily. "Yes, Mr. Francon..." She listened and nodded with

relief. "Yes, Mr. Francon." She turned to the visitor: "Will you go right in,

please?"

The young woman turned and looked at Keating as she passed him on her way to the

stairs. Her eyes went past him without stopping. Something ebbed from his

stunned admiration. He had had time to see her eyes; they seemed weary and a

little contemptuous, but they left him with a sense of cold cruelty.

He heard her walking up the stairs, and the feeling vanished, but the admiration

remained. He approached the reception clerk eagerly.

"Who was that?" he asked.

The clerk shrugged:

"That’s the boss’s little girl."

"Why, the lucky stiff!" said Keating. "He’s been holding out on me."

"You misunderstood me," the clerk said coldly. "It’s his daughter. It’s

Dominique Francon."

"Oh," said Keating. "Oh, Lord!"

"Yeah?" the girl looked at him sarcastically. "Have you read this morning’s

Banner?"

"No. Why?"

"Read it."

Her switchboard buzzed and she turned away from him.

He sent a boy for a copy of the Banner, and turned anxiously to the column,

"Your House," by Dominique Francon. He had heard that she’d been quite

successful lately with descriptions of the homes of prominent New Yorkers. Her

field was confined to home decoration, but she ventured occasionally into

architectural criticism. Today her subject was the new residence of Mr. and Mrs.

Dale Ainsworth on Riverside Drive. He read, among many other things, the

following:

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"You enter a magnificent lobby of golden marble and you think that this is the

City Hall or the Main Post Office, but it isn’t. It has, however, everything:

the mezzanine with the colonnade and the stairway with a goitre and the

cartouches in the form of looped leather belts. Only it’s not leather, it’s

marble. The dining room has a splendid bronze gate, placed by mistake on the

ceiling, in the shape of a trellis entwined with fresh bronze grapes. There are

dead ducks and rabbits hanging on the wall panels, in bouquets of carrots,

petunias and string beans. I do not think these would have been very attractive

if real, but since they are bad plaster imitations, it is all right....The

bedroom windows face a brick wall, not a very neat wall, but nobody needs to see

the bedrooms....The front windows are large enough and admit plenty of light, as

well as the feet of the marble cupids that roost on the outside. The cupids are

well fed and present a pretty picture to the street, against the severe granite

of the fa.ade; they are quite commendable, unless you just can’t stand to look

at dimpled soles every time you glance out to see whether it’s raining. If you

get tired of it, you can always look out of the central windows of the third

floor, and into the cast-iron rump of Mercury who sits on top of the pediment

over the entrance. It’s a very beautiful entrance. Tomorrow, we shall visit the

home of Mr. and Mrs. Smythe-Pickering."

Keating had designed the house. But he could not help chuckling through his fury

when he thought of what Francon must have felt reading this, and of how Francon

was going to face Mrs. Dale Ainsworth. Then he forgot the house and the article.

He remembered only the girl who had written it.

He picked three sketches at random from his table and started for Francon’s

office to ask his approval of the sketches, which he did not need.

On the stair landing outside Francon’s closed door he stopped. He heard

Francon’s voice behind the door, loud, angry and helpless, the voice he always

heard when Francon was beaten.

"...to expect such an outrage! From my own daughter! I’m used to anything from

you, but this beats it all. What am I going to do? How am I going to explain? Do

you have any kind of a vague idea of my position?"

Then Keating heard her laughing; it was a sound so gay and so cold that he knew

it was best not to go in. He knew he did not want to go in, because he was

afraid again, as he had been when he’d seen her eyes.

He turned and descended the stairs. When he had reached the floor below, he was

thinking that he would meet her, that he would meet her soon and that Francon

would not be able to prevent it now. He thought of it eagerly, laughing in

relief at the picture of Francon’s daughter as he had imagined her for years,

revising his vision of his future; even though he felt dimly that it would be

better if he never met her again.

10.

RALSTON HOLCOMBE had no visible neck, but his chin took care of that. His chin

and jaws formed an unbroken arc, resting on his chest. His cheeks were pink,

soft to the touch, with the irresilient softness of age, like the skin of a

peach that has been scalded. His rich white hair rose over his forehead and fell

to his shoulders in the sweep of a medieval mane. It left dandruff on the back

of his collar.

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He walked through the streets of New York, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, a dark

business suit, a pale green satin shirt, a vest of white brocade, a huge black

bow emerging from under his chin, and he carried a staff, not a cane, but a tall

ebony staff surmounted by a bulb of solid gold. It was as if his huge body were

resigned to the conventions of a prosaic civilization and to its drab garments,

but the oval of his chest and stomach sallied forth, flying the colors of his

inner soul.

These things were permitted to him, because he was a genius. He was also

president of the Architects’ Guild of America. Ralston Holcombe did not

subscribe to the views of his colleagues in the organization. He was not a

grubbing builder nor a businessman. He was, he stated firmly, a man of ideals.

He denounced the deplorable state of American architecture and the unprincipled

eclecticism of its practitioners. In any period of history, he declared,

architects built in the spirit of their own time, and did not pick designs from

the past; we could be true to history only in heeding her law, which demanded

that we plant the roots of our art firmly in the reality of our own life. He

decried the stupidity of erecting buildings that were Greek, Gothic or

Romanesque; let us, he begged, be modern and build in the style that belongs to

our days. He had found that style. It was Renaissance.

He stated his reasons clearly. Inasmuch, he pointed out, as nothing of great

historical importance had happened in the world since the Renaissance, we should

consider ourselves still living in that period; and all the outward forms of our

existence should remain faithful to the examples of the great masters of the

sixteenth century.

He had no patience with the few who spoke of a modern architecture in terms

quite different from his own; he ignored them; he stated only that men who

wanted to break with all of the past were lazy ignoramuses, and that one could

not put originality above Beauty. His voice trembled reverently on that last

word. He accepted nothing but stupendous commissions. He specialized in the

eternal and the monumental. He built a great many memorials and capitols. He

designed for International Expositions.

He built like a composer improvising under the spur of a mystic guidance. He had

sudden inspirations. He would add an enormous dome to the flat roof of a

finished structure, or encrust a long vault with gold-leaf mosaic, or rip off a

facade of limestone to replace it with marble. His clients turned pale,

stuttered--and paid. His imperial personality carried him to victory in any

encounter with a client’s thrift; behind him stood the stern, unspoken,

overwhelming assertion that he was an Artist. His prestige was enormous.

He came from a family listed in the Social Register. In his middle years he had

married a young lady whose family had not made the Social Register, but made

piles of money instead, in a chewing-gum empire left to an only daughter.

Ralston Holcombe was now sixty-five, to which he added a few years, for the sake

of his friends’ compliments on his wonderful physique; Mrs. Ralston Holcombe was

forty-two, from which she deducted considerably.

Mrs. Ralston Holcombe maintained a salon that met informally every Sunday

afternoon. "Everybody who is anybody in architecture drops in on us," she told

her friends. "They’d better," she added.

On a Sunday afternoon in March, Keating drove to the Holcombe mansion--a

reproduction of a Florentine palazzo--dutifully, but a little reluctantly. He

had been a frequent guest at these celebrated gatherings and he was beginning to

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be bored, for he knew everybody he could expect to find there. He felt, however,

that he had to attend this time, because the occasion was to be in honor of the

completion of one more capitol by Ralston Holcombe in some state or another.

A substantial crowd was lost in the marble ballroom of the Holcombes, scattered

in forlorn islets through an expanse intended for court receptions. The guests

stood about, self-consciously informal, working at being brilliant. Steps rang

against the marble with the echoing sound of a crypt. The flames of tall candles

clashed desolately with the gray of the light from the street; the light made

the candles seem dimmer, the candles gave to the day outside a premonitory tinge

of dusk. A scale model of the new state capitol stood displayed on a pedestal in

the middle of the room, ablaze with tiny electric bulbs.

Mrs. Ralston Holcombe presided over the tea table. Each guest accepted a fragile

cup of transparent porcelain, took two delicate sips and vanished in the

direction of the bar. Two stately butlers went about collecting the abandoned

cups.

Mrs. Ralston Holcombe, as an enthusiastic girl friend had described her, was

"petite, but intellectual." Her diminutive stature was her secret sorrow, but

she had learned to find compensations. She could talk, and did, of wearing

dresses size ten and of shopping in the junior departments. She wore high-school

garments and short socks in summer, displaying spindly legs with hard blue

veins. She adored celebrities. That was her mission in life. She hunted them

grimly; she faced them with wide-eyed admiration and spoke of her own

insignificance, of her humility before achievement; she shrugged, tight-lipped

and rancorous, whenever one of them did not seem to take sufficient account of

her own views on life after death, the theory of relativity, Aztec architecture,

birth control and the movies. She had a great many poor friends and advertised

the fact. If a friend happened to improve his financial position, she dropped

him, feeling that he had committed an act of treason. She hated the wealthy in

all sincerity: they shared her only badge of distinction. She considered

architecture her private domain. She had been christened Constance and found it

awfully clever to be known as "Kiki," a nickname she had forced on her friends

when she was well past thirty.

Keating had never felt comfortable in Mrs. Holcombe’s presence, because she

smiled at him too insistently and commented on his remarks by winking and

saying: "Why, Peter, how naughty of you!" when no such intention had been in his

mind at all. He bowed over her hand, however, this afternoon as usual, and she

smiled from behind the silver teapot. She wore a regal gown of emerald velvet,

and a magenta ribbon in her bobbed hair with a cute little bow in front. Her

skin was tanned and dry, with enlarged pores showing on her nostrils. She handed

a cup to Keating, a square-cut emerald glittering on her finger in the

candlelight.

Keating expressed his admiration for the capitol and escaped to examine the

model. He stood before it for a correct number of minutes, scalding his lips

with the hot liquid that smelled of cloves. Holcombe, who never looked in the

direction of the model and never missed a guest stopping before it, slapped

Keating’s shoulder and said something appropriate about young fellows learning