TWENTY

Paul Durand-Ruel appeared at the door to tell Miss Cassatt that more visitors had come. As she turned to leave, there was an exchange with Degas that I did not understand.

“He wants me to let him show a painting he did of me a while back,” she explained with a shake of her head. “It is ugly, just ugly. I told him no. I told him no a thousand times.” Another sharp exchange in French by the gesticulating M. Degas was followed by further explanation. “Ha! He says ‘Women can never forgive me. They hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.’ He just likes to needle me. Come, we must go greet some wealthy Americans. He’ll like that. He can sell them some more of his pictures.” She led us out and we climbed the steps back to her showing, where we found that the young ladies of the Johnstone party had arrived.

M. Durand-Ruel had preceded us and was ushering Mrs. Johnstone around the room, entertaining her with stories, by the time we entered. I wondered how successful he would be. I suspected her taste in art would be governed by the opinion of the official salons, but I had no way of knowing. She was dressed in a walking suit with a short yellow bolero jacket that stretched tight against her roly-poly figure and was edged with a fringe of little black balls that jiggled when she moved.

Lydia Johnstone and her two friends, dressed in the same suits they had worn at Notre Dame and each leaning on a parasol, were admiring the first picture by the door, of a woman and a child being rowed in a boat at the seashore. I noticed Miss Stuart had substituted a plain straw hat for the one she had returned to the milliner. They greeted Miss Cassatt and thanked her for the invitation. Their eyes were wide at the number and quality of the pictures hung around the room. Somehow all those plainly painted women doing ordinary tasks seemed more substantial than these artfully clothed young people. Miss Cassatt introduced them to the other American women.

“How wonderful,” Lydia said. “We’ve been studying painting while we’re here. I told my papa we had to have a teacher, but Mama wasn’t sympathetic. She absolutely refused to let us have the paints and such in the house. So we found a nice young man with a studio we could go to in Montmartre.” She named the artist who they studied with and Miss Cassatt blandly steered the conversation into what they’d chosen for the subjects of their paintings. It seemed, as beginners, they were sticking to flowers and inanimate objects. Miss Cassatt pointed out that Mrs. Choate Sears had chosen flowers as the subject of a painting of hers that hung in the Exposition. They were impressed.

Lydia spotted her mother with the art dealer and promptly began to nag her to purchase a painting. I wandered around taking in the pictures one at a time. Miss Stuart and Miss Brown stood before a scene of two women having tea. They commented on how familiar it seemed, and speculated on the conversation that might be going on.

Lydia joined us, annoyed at the rebuff from her mother. “Well, really, I don’t see that it’s any more expensive than a trip to Worth,” she said. “I’m going to approach Papa. He would buy me a painting. I want one to take home with me.”

Edith Stuart said, “I thought he told your mother to stop the buying spree. He might not be as easy to convince as you think.”

That made Lydia angry. “Yes, well, some of us pay our bills when they come in and don’t wait for a dunning letter. And if some of us have any more of those, Papa might really get upset and send someone home.”

There was an uneasy silence that Grace Greenway Brown broke into. “Some people actually consider art an investment. I mean, they purchase a painting today, with the expectation that in a few years it will be worth even more.”

“You got that from Mr. Palmer,” Lydia said. “Honoré has visited some of the galleries with us,” she told me.

“He mentioned to me that his parents had bought pictures in the past by newer painters who have already become quite well known,” Grace added.

“Do you contemplate such a purchase?” I asked.

“No, not really. But I was interested to learn about it all the same.”

Lydia was bored when the conversation veered from her concerns. “Lord James told me the art in his family goes back to the Renaissance. He said one of his ancestors had a portrait done by Holbein. The National Gallery wanted to buy it but they wouldn’t let it go.”

“You’re very friendly with Lord James,” I said. It was fairly easy to provoke an answer from her, as long as she was the topic of conversation and I was curious about the attachment, if it existed.

“Yes, we’re getting very close. We’ve just been having a grand old time and I’m getting to know all about him, everything. You’d be surprised.” I thought I would be surprised actually. “We even share our secrets.”

“Secrets? Lord James?”

“Oh, yes. He can be very wicked about his relations. He says just the most terrible things about them. But I promised not to repeat them.”

Miss Cassatt had joined us. “How are you proceeding with your classes? Will you return home with some finished pieces? Or, perhaps continue on here with your studies after the Exposition?”

“Oh, lord, no,” Lydia said. “We’ve been really bad lately, with so many engagements and so much going on. And I don’t think Mama would ever let me stay in Paris without her.” She looked across the room to where M. Durand-Ruel appeared to be finally giving up on enticing Mrs. Johnstone to make a purchase. “But I might get Papa to agree.” By the expression on her face, I assumed she was contemplating the advantages of staying in Paris without her parents. It seemed an unlikely scenario to me.

Miss Brown had no reservations about putting a pin in Lydia’s inflated imaginings. “As with many things, we began with good intentions and we were serious at first. We attended classes twice a week and visited the studio to work one day in between. But then the Exposition opened and we got busy with all of those engagements. I’m afraid we haven’t been back to our easels in several weeks.” She had no illusions about their commitment to the work. They might be students in the art academy, but none of them had the stubborn dedication it would take to do what Miss Cassatt, and some of the other women artists in the room, had done.

Lydia looked around, oblivious to the conclusions the rest of us understood. “We’ll go back to the studio tomorrow. You’ve inspired me. Someday I’ll have a room full of pictures like this, too. Oh, no…I forgot…there’s a reception tonight, and we said we’d do tea with the Barneys tomorrow. Next week, then. I’ll send a message to the studio that we’ll be coming. And I’ll have to talk to Papa about staying on. Oh, Miss Cassatt, thank you so much for having us. I see my mother beckoning. She has yet another engagement for us. I’m sure she’s disappointed M. Durand-Ruel by not buying a painting. But don’t worry. I’ll come back with Papa or Lord James. I’ll get one of them to buy one for me.”

Miss Cassatt assured her she was not in the least disappointed and the Johnstone party made their exit.

When they were gone, I found Miss Cassatt was quite acerbic in her views. “American women have been spoiled, treated and indulged like children. They must wake up to their duties. Women should be someone and not something.” I thought of the young women in the Worth creations priming themselves to marry into the aristocracy so that they could become a duchess or countess. Those were the women she was thinking of. “Americans have a way of thinking work is nothing. ‘Come out and play,’ they say.” She looked around the room full of her paintings, overflowing with her work. “I have not done all that I wanted to,” she continued. “But I tried to make a good fight.”

How very different her attitude was to that of the young women who had just left. But I realized that the others still in the room, looking at the work and conversing, shared her views.

Miss Cassatt told me that the artist Lydia and the others were studying with was known more for socializing with wealthy young women tourists than for his paintings. But his studio was in the area where Degas and other artists also worked.

“Could they have met Denise Laporte there?”

“An interesting question. I’ll see what I can find out. Bertha is worried about her son, isn’t she?” Miss Cassatt could be blunt.

“I’m afraid she is. All this talk about an American lover, I think she’s afraid he was involved with the dead girl, even though that’s highly unlikely, given his personality. He is too much of a gentleman.”

“I am of two minds about whether to pursue this further,” she said. “It might be possible to discover who the man was that she lived with, if Degas has the address. But who is to say he was the only one? And what good would it do our friend’s son?”

I wasn’t able to answer that question.