This would be a new
pleasure, even greater than poring over his photograph or re-reading his
last letter.
She was hoping to meet Argensola, the friend of good counsels, for she
knew that he was still living in the studio. Twice he had come to see
her by the service stairway as in the old days, but she had been out.
As she went up in the elevator, her heart was palpitating with pleasure
and distress. It occurred to the good lady that the "foolish virgins"
must have had feelings like this when for the first time they fell from
the heights of virtue.
The tears came to her eyes when she beheld the room whose furnishings
and pictures so vividly recalled the absent. Argensola hastened from the
door at the end of the room, agitated, confused, and greeting her with
expressions of welcome at the same time that he was putting sundry
objects out of sight. A woman's sweater lying on the divan, he covered
with a piece of Oriental drapery--a hat trimmed with flowers, he sent
flying into a far-away corner. Dona Luisa fancied that she saw a bit of
gauzy feminine negligee embroidered in pink, flitting past the window
frame. Upon the divan were two big coffee cups and bits of toast
evidently left from a double breakfast. These artists! . . . The same
as her son! And she was moved to compassion over the bad life of Julio's
counsellor.
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