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By Root 8776 0

staircase and go up to her room. She was excited by the idea of being alone in a hotel room with a young man and thought how shocked Eleanor would be if she knew about it. They smoked cigarettes and talked about the theatre a little distractedly, and at last Freddy put his arm around her waist and kissed her and asked if he could stay al night. She let him kiss her but she could only think of Dirk and told him please not this time, and he was very contrite and begged her with tears in his eyes to forgive him for sul ying a beautiful moment. She said she didn't mean that and to come back and have breakfast with her. After he'd gone she half wished she'd made him stay. Her body tingled al over the way it used to when Dirk put his arms around her and she wanted terribly to know what making love was like. She took a cold bath and went to bed. When she woke up and saw Freddy again she'd decide whether she was in love with him. But the next morning she got a telegram cal ing her home. Dad was seriously il with diabetes. Freddy put her on the train. She'd expected that the parting would carry her off her-feet, but it didn't somehow. Dr. Hutchins got better and Eveline took him down to Santa Fé to recuperate. Her mother was sick most of the time too, and as Margaret and Adelaide were both married and George had gotten a job abroad with Hoover's Belgian Relief, it seemed to be up to her to take care of the old peo-ple. She spent a dreamy unhappy year in spite of the great skeleton landscape and horsebacktrips and working at

-123-watercolors of Mexicans and Indian penitentes. She went around the house ordering meals, attending to housekeep-ing, irritated by the stupidity of servantgirls, making out laundry lists.

The only man she met there who made her seem alive

was José O'Riely. He was a Spaniard in spite of his Irish name, a slender young man with a tobaccocolored face and dark green eyes, who had somehow gotten married to a stout Mexican woman who brought out a new squal ing brown infant every nine months. He was a painter and lived by doing odd carpenter jobs and sometimes posing as a model. Eveline got to talk to him one day when he was painting the garage doors and asked him to pose for her. He kept looking at the pastel she was doing of him and tel ing her it was wretched, until she broke down and cried. He apologized in his stiff English and said she must not be upset, that she had talent and that he'd teach her to draw himself. He took her down to his house, an untidy little shack in the Mexican part of town, where he intro-duced her to Lola, his wife, who looked at her with scared suspicious black eyes, and showed her his paintings, big retablos painted on plaster that looked like Italian primi-tives. "You see I paint martires," he said, "but not Chris-tian. I paint the martires of the working class under ex-ploitation. Lola does not understand. She want me to paint rich ladies like you and make plenty money. Which you think is best?" Eveline flushed; she didn't like being classed with the rich ladies. But the pictures thril ed her and she said she would advertise them among her friends; she de-cided she'd discovered a genius. O'Riely was grateful and wouldn't take any money for posing or criticizing her paintings after that, instead he sometimes borrowed smal sums as a friend. Even before he started making love to her, she decided that this time it must be a real affair. She'd go crazy if something didn't happen to her soon.

-124-The main difficulty was finding somewhere they could go. Her studio was right back of the house and there was the danger that her father or mother or friends coming to cal might break in on them any time. Then too Santa Fé

was a smal place and people were already noticing how often he went to her studio. One night when the Hutchins' chauffeur was away, they climbed up to his room above the garage. It was pitch black there and smel ed of old pipes and soiled clothes. Eveline was terrified to find she'd lost control of her own self; it was like going under ether. He was surprised to find she